Before long, the outline of a company capable of adapting to its new environment began to take shape. Today, after only five years, the company's accomplishments are unmistakable.
* Granite Rock's new quarrying and materials-handling technologies are unmatched in the industry and have made the company the region's low-cost producer of crushed rock ( aggregate, in the trade).
* Granite Rock's quality and service levels allow it to charge a price premium of up to 6% for concrete and asphalt, yet still gain market share, as it has done every year since 1987.
* Despite unionization, the company engenders fierce loyalty in its 400 employees. Few leave, except to retire. Many learn more than one job. Most serve on one or more of the company's 100-plus quality teams. Employees often seem to do more than the job requires.
* The company has developed fast, effective methods of solving problems. A customer is dissatisfied? A batch of asphalt is bad? An employee is unhappy? At most companies, managers react to such everyday glitches by reaching for their fire fighters' hats. At Granite Rock the appearance of a problem touches off an automatic and systematic response designed to identify and correct the problem at its source.
Woolpert seldom uses words like learning and adapting in describing Granite Rock; he favors phrases such as a total quality company. Never mind. Whatever else Granite Rock may be, it is also a huge mechanism for gathering, analyzing, and acting on information. The company learns both as an organization and through individuals. If Woolpert were to teach a course on how to build such a business, what follows might be the syllabus.
Get The Information
"The role of managers," says Woolpert, instantly redefining what generations of executives have thought of as their job, "is to make sure there's a flood of information coming into the company." What's a flood? Judge for yourself. Data pour in from at least three sources.
* Customers. Granite Rock is famous for its customer "report cards," annual surveys that ask buyers to rate the company against its competitors. (See "How're We Doing?", No. 05910801, May 1991.) But the report cards are only part of the story. Longer surveys every three or four years provide more detailed information about customer needs and wants. Quick-response cards ("Please comment on the service and products you received today") and a short-pay system (customers aren't charged for a product or service they're unhappy with) ensure that Granite Rock hears about serious problems right away. Periodic focus groups let the company probe for ideas about new products and services.
The result: Granite Rock learns where to concentrate its resources. In concrete, for example, on-time delivery is critical to customer satisfaction. In the quarry, two issues turned out to be paramount. "What we heard from a focus group," remembers Clark, who is now a division manager, "was that customers wanted to pick up rock at any time of day or night, and above all, that they wanted to get in and out quickly." Those requests led to what may be Granite Rock's most dramatic technological innovation (and one of its biggest investments), a loading system dubbed Granite Xpress. Today truckers picking up crushed stone pull up to the quarry, check their order on the computer, stick a magnetic card in a slot, and load their own from automatic overhead bins. Like an ATM, the system functions around the clock. It has cut the time a trucker spends at the quarry from an average of about 30 minutes to less than 10.
* The Company's Own Operations. Like a high-tech manufacturer, Granite Rock produces regular statistical-process-control charts for its products: size variability for a dozen kinds of aggregate, mix variability for a hundred concrete recipes. And it can tell you exactly how it's performing on key measures of customer service, such as on-time delivery (now close to 95%). Monthly charts go up on every company bulletin board, giving employees both a benchmark and a goal.
But where other companies Granite Rock's size might chart a dozen critical variables, Granite Rock seems to chart a hundred. Chief financial officer Rita Alves tracks changes in the aging of receivables, in the time it takes to turn around a credit application, in the accuracy of the company's sales invoices, in on-time delivery of operating statements. Transportation manager Mike Marheineke, who oversees delivery of aggregate to Granite Rock's production facilities, treats his internal customers like external ones, gathering survey data about on-time delivery, drivers' attitudes, and the like. The Redwood City asphalt plant tracks not only "big" variables, like product quality, but also "little" ones, like the time it takes customers to load up and get back on the road.
By now this culture of information gathering has become a kind of corporate reflex. Manuel Rangel, a mechanic in the company's Santa Cruz maintenance shop, decided on his own initiative to track the number of road-service calls he received. "I asked him why he was doing that," says Bruce Woolpert, shaking his head in wonder. "He told me, 'The best measure of preventive maintenance is whether we have any breakdowns. If I see the number of breakdowns declining, then I know I'm doing a good job."
* The Outside World. You say your company invites an occasional speaker? In the 12 months ending with November 1991 Granite Rock heard from Judith Segal ("Confronting Problem Behavior"), Steven L. Phillips ("Improving Teamwork and Quality Team Effectiveness"), Jerry Harvey ("Management by Agreement"), Wynne Carvill ("Basic Law"), and Charles Harwood ("Making Quality Happen"). The programs are part of what has been dubbed Graniterock University, and everyone who wants to come is welcome -- on company time. Attendance? "Typically 50, 60, 70 people," says personnel director Shirley Ow. On a more practical level, suppliers give frequent technical presentations for managers and hourly workers alike. A seminar sponsored by King Bearing Co., in November, discussed matters such as antifriction bearings and V-belt drives. A Caterpillar seminar in December covered the operation and maintenance of Cat equipment.
