Goodwill Of Central & Southern Indiana Saves Big With ThinkLP

About Goodwill of Central & Southern Indiana

Goodwill changes lives every day by empowering people to increase their independence and reach their potential through education, health and employment. Thanks to the dedication of their team of over 4,000 employees—more than half of whom face employment challenges, including disability, limited education or criminal history—more than 4,000 students have earned a high school diploma, and nearly 3,000 families have been served by Nurse-Family Partnership, Goodwill’s home visiting program for first-time, low-income mothers. With more than 100 retail stores, charter schools and commercial services contracts, Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana is one of the largest Goodwills in North America.

Seamless Conversion

The Safety & Loss Prevention teams at Goodwill of Central & Southern Indiana recognized there were potential opportunities to improve existing incident reporting, auditing and recordkeeping systems. Too much time was wasted bouncing from one application to another, generating reports, and conducting audits on paper which had to be entered later, all while utilizing a tool that was just not user friendly. Everything changed when they discovered ThinkLP. According to Eugene Pride, Director of Safety and Wellness at Goodwill, the conversion went efficiently and seamlessly with ThinkLP’s automated scripts,“ThinkLP did a wonderful job pulling together the data from our previous tool and helping us create a better, easier-to-use tool.”

Increased Visibility of Safety Culture

Safety has always been a part of the culture at Goodwill of Central & Southern Indiana, and ThinkLP is helping to strengthen that safety culture through awareness, collaboration, communication and pro-active actions company-wide. The ThinkLP team worked with Goodwill to document safety programs across the organization. If there’s a safety committee at a location, the team wants to know, because to them, information is power. If there’s an emergency drill, they want to know. If there’s a monthly inspection, they want to know. If there’s a safety training, ER drill or safety committee meeting, the safety team wants to know. Goodwill believes visibility into the safety culture empowers leaders to drive behavioural change, improve safety awareness and reduce accidents across the organization.

Accidents Down 29%

The safety team at Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana works hard to make every area of the business safer for everyone. Inspections, audits and emergency drills are all part of the procedure, and safety committees meet regularly to stay current with training and safety issues. With ThinkLP’s department automation platform running like a well-oiled machine and doing all the heavy lifting, the safety team has more time to spend on the prevention of injuries in the workplace. At the time of this article, Goodwill is pleased to have realized a 29% reduction in employee injury cases year to date compared to the same period in the previous year. Another benefit of partnering with ThinkLP: You can invest your time where it matters the most, because you can rely on ThinkLP to cover the rest.

Time Spent on Audits Cut in Half

It’s a new day for Pride, who was quick to see the power of ThinkLP, noting, “The potential with the mobile app takes us to a whole new level.”Goodwill performs hundreds of audits and inspections each month, and, in particular, four departments conduct 25 audit templates with more than 500 users across more than 100 locations. A mobile tool that saves time and can handle high volume is critical for a new audit platform. Now, with ThinkLP audit, Goodwill has discovered mobile audit is amazingly easy to use. Auditors just walk the location answering questions, dictating comments, snapping pictures, assigning action items and looking for those opportunities whereby the organization can improve.On the subject of time savings, Eugene said, “ThinkLP mobile audit has saved us, at a minimum, 50% of our time conducting audits.”Operational audits, conducted by directors, contain hundreds of questions. In order to save directors time and to alleviate the unnecessary, monotonous clicking of compliance answers, these audits were pre-answered “Compliant”, which allowed directors to focus on coaching their location managers, rather than answering questions. This efficiency enhances the 50% improvement.

Honest Audit Scores More Valuable Than High Scores

Pride interprets poor audit scores differently than most. “Your score is 60%, that’s great—an honest audit. I see that you also have 25 actions items in progress, keep up the great work,” he says, when coaching a manager. He maintains that it is better to have a score of 60% than 100%. Surprised? He reasons that in most cases, there is some opportunity for improvement, so a score of 100% is often the result of misaligned expectations between the manager and the audit. Goodwill understands this and uses help text on ThinkLP Audit to illustrate expectations on a question-by-question basis, complete with an instruction video, pictures and/or a work instruction sheet. Bottom line: It’s better to identify your faults and learn than to pencil whip a perfect score.

One-Stop Shop

For Matt Pearsey, Regional Loss Prevention Manager at Goodwill, one of the strengths of ThinkLP is its comprehensive format. “ThinkLP is all-in-one. Our old system required regular users to log in and out of two separate systems, and for administrators it was five or six. With ThinkLP, it’s just one!” It was designed to house everything under one roof so that every item in the tool can interact with every other item. For example, an audit may expose fraud, which could spawn an investigation. In another scenario, say a new Store Manager is hired, ThinkLP’s comprehensive workflow system could send a welcome letter, schedule an audit and record baseline statistics on his or her employee record.

Continuous Improvement Built In

Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana is using the tool for something never before done with ThinkLP. Using mobile audit, the Continuous Improvement Team employs Kaizen and Six Sigma strategies to ensure there is always improvement from one day to the next. Typically, Kaizen is associated with product quality improvements. Mike Schuster, Continuous Improvement Manager at Goodwill, uses Kaizen to drive waste out of Goodwill’s processes. Goodwill is a labor-intensive organization and as operations continue, it’s necessary to identify areas for improvement. The Goodwill team values ThinkLP’s ability to capture standards at retail sites, evaluate reality versus expectation and discover growth opportunities. Sometimes the standard is too high or too low, sometimes it’s the people and other times it’s just the process. Results help Goodwill improve standards over time.

ThinkLP Helps Allocate Resources

With a focused and lean team, Goodwill must be strategic about where to allocate its security resources. ThinkLP’s intelligent reporting has helped Goodwill identify where to best spend time, invest money and provision resources. Matt Pearsey recognizes the cost-efficiency. “When I’ve got some free time, l use ThinkLP to find where certain types of incidents are occurring more often and go there. You have to fish where the fish are at. This is how we get the biggest bang for our buck.”

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