100 Blogs later… To celebrate our 100th blog posting, our subscribers picked their favorite from the Taylor resource library. View their top picks.
National Forklift Safety Day is Tuesday, June 9th. The day encourages safer behavior in warehouses, distribution centers, and manufacturing plants. Download Taylor’s guide to forklift safety by clicking the image below.
Congratulations to Grant (GM Warehousing) on being selected as the Rising Leader semi-finalist for February by the Goering Center. He was selected under the category of Dynamic Business Strategy, which is one of the 10 best practices of family & private businesses – the criteria for the Rising Leaders program. Learn more about Goering Center’s Rising Leader program here: https://business.uc.edu/faculty-and-research/research-centers/goering/family-and-private-business-awards/rising-leader.html
As a company, it’s important to us to build a culture of continuous improvement from the bottom-up, empowering all team Taylor members to seek opportunities for growth continuously; it’s how we find strength within our organization. Through continuous improvement, embracing change and innovation, we become our customer’s strategic partner and their competitive advantage in supply chain performance.
Taylor employs a team of Six Sigma & LEAN certified team members to lead our continuous improvement programs. All of which provide consistency training across all departments to ensure our processes are as seamless as possible to reduce costs and save time. Some ways Taylor helps to enable processes improvement are:
Employees should not be limited to suggestions. Instead, they have the power to test and implement changes within the organization. Process changes are monitored, talked about, and measured to ensure they provide the desired outcome.
When it comes to continually improving processes on the warehouse floor and in the office, it’s the people doing the work who offer some of the best suggestions. Yes, it can be challenging to get people to question the way they have always done a particular process to make it better. That’s why we provide a comfortable work environment where all ideas are good ideas.
Nothing is more important than the safety of employees, our customers, our customers customers, and the motoring public. We also value food safety, food quality, and compliance, be it regulatory or our customers specifications.
Quality requires innovative thinking, dedication, effort and continuous improvement. Continuous improvement consists of incremental efforts to improve all aspects of the business no matter how small. Dedication and effort directed towards quality will allow for creative problem solving and evolutionary results. Innovation will follow and allows larger gains.
Business is the ultimate team sport and teamwork is the cornerstone of success. We must build on our strengths and organize to make our weaknesses irrelevant. Team working is powerful and takes sustained effort to achieve. We must be collaborative to create and maintain the company values and success.
We exist to create lasting relationships, both internal and external. Relationships add value and are the groundwork for collaboration, innovation and continuous improvement.
Ethics means taking the long view. We have been in business since 1850 and must conduct our business as such. We act towards our co-workers, customers, and the business with the highest level of ethical behaviors.
For Continuous improvement programs to succeed, one must understand the role of company values and culture. If you read the above core values, what will stand out to you is that for them to actually happen, you must invest in your people. Company culture and values will generate a creative and innovative environment, which is the foundation for process improvement.
We would like to Congratulate the September 2019 monthly winners from our team in Bellevue, NE. These awards are based off of productivity and QA points. To learn more about our warehousing awards click here.
Most Improved– Emmett Williams
Receiving– Justin Rundel
Loading– Emmett Williams
Putaway– Eddy Rosete
Picking– Nate Juhl & Shawn Emmons
Congrats to all the Winners!
Although Taylor’s taglines have changed throughout our nearly 170 years in business, they’ve always been geared around our founding year. From “Since 1850″ to the longer ” Your Trusted Partner Since 1850″ we’ve never shied away from telling people our age. However, through recent research amongst our customers as well as industry experts, it came to our attention to rethink our tagline and our overall branding. No, we’re not getting rid of “Since 1850″, but it’s no longer our primary talking point. It’s moved to the secondary so we could talk about our processes and people first. We are thus repositioning our brand to the new era of ” The Nation’s Most Innovative Family Owned Logistics Company.”
Why the change? We asked our customers why they like working with Taylor. What sets us apart from the thousands of other logistics companies out there? Two key points stood out to us the most the first being the fact that we are a family owned and operated business, and the second being our innovation. Taylor is a mid-sized family owned business currently in 6/7th generation ownership. We provide a level of customer service that large corporations cannot. But more importantly, we are progressive; we stay up to date on our software, processes, and technology. But it doesn’t just stop there; our company culture is progressive. We rely profoundly on education and our quality program. Our quality program is a massive part of how we stay on the cusp of innovation not only is it apart of our mission, but it is also in our values. At Taylor, we have a saying: 85% on improving processes and 15% on innovation. That’s what makes us the Nation’s Most Innovative Family Owned Logistics Company.
Employee education is an essential key to the success of your organization- it’s a fundamental way to set your business apart from the competition. Employees who feel their company is invested in their careers are likely to stay longer and work harder. On top of employee satisfaction training allows your employees to become more versatile and bolsters the value of that employee. There countless benefits to the importance of employee development, such as– a more competitive workforce, increased employee retention, and higher employee engagement.
At Taylor Logistics, we make sure all staff members in any role are equipped with the tools they need to succeed. We have memberships to many professional logistics, warehousing, management, and quality organizations that allow our employees to benefit from their classes, webinars, and discussions. Organizations such as The Resource for Warehouse Logistics (IWLA) which offer various course offerings throughout the year. A number of our staff members have attended IWLA courses including their Essentials of Warehousing and Rate Class. All classes are closed with a course exam and upon a passing grade are complete with a certificate adding value to that employees’ career.
Along with classes, our upper management will send several employees a year to various conferences in our particular fields. It’s a part of the Taylor model not only to learn and grow from these opportunities but to gain a new network from them. Through these various organizations and conferences, we have expanded our industry contact list, which allows for continuous brainstorming and mentorship.
Training doesn’t have to be as complicated as sending someone to a class for a certification or to a conference but can be a tutorial on creating a PowerPoint Presentation or on Adobe InDesign formatting. If there is an area an employee is looking to improve in, we try and provide the tools necessary for their success. The importance of training our employees – both new and experienced – cannot be overemphasized in our organization.
Other classes, organizations, conferences, and certifications our staff attends:
IWLA, IANA, TIA, TMSA, WERC, Lean, SQF, Six Sigma
Since transitioning to our new warehouse on International Boulevard in Cincinnati, Ohio our operation managers have decided to implement new principals into our daily practice. At our old facility all employees, visitors, and contractors were required to wear the standard yellow safety vest. Having everyone in the same colored vest made it hard for managers and employees to distinguish team Taylor from contractors on the warehouse floor. Grant Taylor General Manager of Contract Warehousing had an amazing idea to order different colored vests and create categories for the various different colors. Taylor employees in yellow, contractors and visitors in orange, and all management in a tri-colored vests. This way everyone can spot who is who on the warehouse floor.
Since the implementation of the different vest categories we have had great response from warehouse operators and our warehouse management. Clay Revis Taylor’s World Park Warehouse Manager states “ It’s more of a safety thing than anything, there are several projects happening on the warehouse floor. It’s nice to look out and see where the contractors are” . At Taylor we are always looking for ways to improve our processes and by doing so we follow a procedure called 5s. 5s is an organization technique to create and maintain an intuitive workspace. Given the name 5s there are five essential categories sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain. The implementation of the safety vests falls under the 4th S which is “standardize” set standards for a consistently organized workplace. As we continue to refine practices we will be using the 5s model to help guide us to a safer and more profitable warehouse.
In 1841, aboard a small ship called the Russell Glover, John Taylor (1794-1875), his wife Dinah Raikes, and their six children including our founder John Rex Taylor emigrated from Bath, England to the United States, arriving in New Orleans in March. From this popular immigrant port, the Taylors made their way up the Mississippi River to the bustling river town of Cincinnati, Ohio where John Rex Taylor assiduously began his business (before 1850, but who’s counting?) with a horse and wagon, delivering goods to and from the Miami and Erie Canal the engineering marvel which ran from Toledo to Cincinnati, providing goods from as far as New York City. He named his business the Taylor Drayage Company, thus creating the point from which we trace our values, vision, and culture. Soon after, John Taylor joined his son in the business. The 1860 census shows John Taylor as Drayman and John Rex Taylor as a Laborer. For reasons unknown, John Rex Taylor and his wife moved to Wisconsin for a few years (most likely to start a new terminal for the business) but soon returned to find John Taylor in charge of the Taylor Drayage Company. Along with his father and son Edward, John Rex Taylor operated the business as a family affair, the same way we do today. In the early 1900s, Edward took over the business, adding larger and stronger wagons, pulled by two or more horses, called teamsters. The 1910 census shows Edward as a Team Owner. However, the increasingly viable motor truck put the horse and wagon at risk and it was during this time that Edward was succeeded by his son, John Rex Taylor III. During the Horseless Age John Rex Taylor III steered the company through disruptive technological advances, economic turmoil, and strict government regulations. The change to motor trucks brought the decline of the Miami and Erie Canal canal an important route to the Taylor Drayage Company and the rise of the rails, spurring two important events: a move closer to the railroads and a change of the name to the Taylor Trucking Company. During this time, our three largest customers were Oscar Meyer, Swift, and Planter’s Peanuts. To this day our market focus is food. John Rex Taylor III kept the company steady, effective, and innovative in the midst of this major change in American commerce and transportation, along with the dangers of the Great Depression and the Motor Carrier Act of 1935. Because of this act, today we boast the Motor Carrier number 022276, a true testament to our longstanding history in the Cincinnati transportation business. John Rex Taylor III’s legacy teaches us that ultimately, effectiveness trumps efficiency. No amount of efficiency in horse drawn wagons would have allowed us to stay in business. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing. Bringing the company through the mid-century was John Rex Taylor III’s son, John Rex Taylor IV; or, Jack Taylor. Jack was the family’s first college graduate (Indiana University, 1949) and a proud member of General Patton’s Third Army in Europe. With the addition of warehousing, the company name changed again, this time to its current Taylor Distributing Company. With customers like Jolly Rancher, York Candies, M&M Candies, and Vicks Cold Medicine, Taylor continued its dedication to food storage during a boom in the Candy industry. Jack Taylor also saw a major change in the development of Warehouse Management Systems. In the beginning, inventory control was done manually. Jack kept it all in his head. But in 1972, with a move to a new warehouse on nine acres of land on Sharon Road, the company saw its first automatic technology: the IBM System/34, running on RPG II, with 64KB of memory. Today, our warehouse runs on the organized and efficient Synapse by Zethcon. Under the current management the sixth generation formed a third business, Taylor Logistics Inc., a brokerage-based logistics offering integrated solutions. And after many years in the pool distribution business, Taylor ended its operation to focus fully on the drayage business, bringing us full circle to our heritage. From its founding in 1850 to today, the Taylor companies have represented a steadfast, adaptive, and continuously improving business that has earned its longstanding reputation and defined the standards of logistics by committing to excellence in customer service and employee satisfaction.