I already talked about what we decided to do as a result of our strategy session regarding our new organizational chart and the shifts in responsibilities. Now here is how we implemented the change.

Over a period of three weeks we did the following four steps:

1. We finalized the new plan. It came after much debate and discussion, but we did come up with a plan that all our key managers were in favour of.

2. We rewrote the job descriptions to reflect the new org chart. We wanted to be fully prepared and able to head off any objection and concern.

3. We executed on our plan. One by one, we talked to all our staff about the changes, presented the new job descriptions and the fact that they were going to be effective by the end of that week.

4. We then instilled confidence in the new team. Once the band-aid was ripped off quickly (we did it all in one day), we assembled the teams the fist of the following week to instil confidence and move on.

5. Finally we finished executing on our plan. We filled the new empty positions from existing staff mostly, we moved to lean scheduling and project based scheduling and we fulfilled all our objectives that we set out to do.

There were some hiccups and twists, and we did lose one person unexpectedly, but in the end, the results were pretty much as we had planned.

The proof is really in the pudding. By pinpointing our inventories of time, changing our org chart, becoming more efficient and having a structure that gave us more flexibility, we were able to save enough to create a new position inside the store while saving approximately 6-8% off our total wage costs (depending on the store), so far year to date.

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