What can Brown do for you? Pen 6 part 2

Here's part 1.

So you saw what I was going in for. I really didn't want to be there and kind of went through the motions for the first week. Our belt didn't turn around at all. I just wandered around feeling sorry for myself about getting kicked out of the sort aisle.

It wasn't until that first Friday that things changed. We had a bad day and went down bad. Lou was watching with his boss and Marie. And that's when it hit me. They wanted me to fail. So I called everyone around and gave a pretty good speech. I told them that no one believed in us and that we needed to show them how to run this belt.

So I devised a plan of attack over the weekend. I decided to do what my former full-time supervisor Shon used to say, take away their excuses. I knew why Pen 6 couldn't go down on time because they told us plenty of times it was the missorts. So if I could go down clean with the missorts, it would show that it is possible and that the sort aisle would need to just get better.
I put missort carts in between all the loaders and one in front of loader #2. I told him to take off all Corona center packages (Chino, Chino Hills, Diamond Bar, Norco) since there was never a lot of those to begin with. This put more pressure on loader #1, but his cars were more bulk stops anyway, so he didn't have a hard time loading. I put a cart in between loaders #3 & #5 and told them to take off any Foothill center packages (Rancho, Upland, Mt. Baldy, Alta Loma, Pomona, Montclair, Claremont). And I had a cart in between loaders #2 & #4 that pulled off any Pen 5 packages, which was mainly Ontario 91764. In theory, the missorts left over would be for Pen 7 and loaders #5 & #6 could just slide them on the rollers.

It was a thing of beauty. It was rough the first day because they complained about the extra work, but I assured them it would be better in the end. Before the second day was over it was clear this was working. We started to turn the ship around quickly. Now just like on Pen 9, I held the bulk until the end, but this time no one questioned it.

There was one time I yelled at Tom so bad because he delivered 7 carts of missorts from another belt after all but 3 of my loaders had left. I was fuming mad. I became proactive and sent loader #2 to search different places to find the carts and bring them to us.

The sort aisle noticed a decrease in the amount of returns coming back because we weren't sending as much back. In fact, every cart we built we would hand deliver it to the proper Pen.

In a matter of 2 weeks, Pen 6 went from being the laughing stock of the building to the best Pen in the building in terms of pieces per hour. Adrian came out after the sort and looked around and was very impressed and always asked "why couldn't the sup before you run it like this?" I really didn't know why. It wasn't the hardest fix I ever did.

Tom and Lou were both very complementary of the changes made to Pen 6 and congradulated me often. But the best was still to come, Shon my old full time sup from Pen 9 was back in the building as my new full time sup...again. Things were looking up. But we all know that didn't last long. Enter Chuck, Mike G., and a lot of empty promises.

What can Brown do for you?: Pen 6 part 1

So after burning some bridges with Lou and even getting on Tom's nerves enough I was sent off packing to Pen 6 when I got back from vacation. I will do a post on vacations at UPS, but pretty much every time I went on vacation, I was in a new area when I returned.

Now, before I get into my time at Pen 6 I need to talk about how bad the belt was when I got there. Pen 6 was horrible. Seriously horrible. Pathetic, ugly, you think of the worst word to describe something and you just described Pen 6. It was a supervisor's worst nightmare.

Pen 6 was a belt to car pen, unlike my time on Pen 9 which was a slide to car. With a slide to car, your employees don't need to be at work on time and if someone is sick you can stack the packages on the slide or grating. The only man you need on a slide to car is your pick off man. With a belt to car, if you are missing one person...screwed. The belt just keeps moving and if you miss your package it just builds up at the end of the belt. Loaders #1 & #2 were called splitters. There were the pick offs of a belt to car. They knew where every package went and would either push or pull a package to the correct side.
Here is my attempt at giving you a visual for Pen 6.
So you can see if loader #1 missed his package it would go down to #5 and build up back there causing him all sorts of problems. Plus that "slide to Pen 7" was a slide that came down from the sky and was actually eye level with loaders #5 & #6. By the way, loader #4 did have a longer car known as a Wally. It's the big van that had a handful of stops, usually at a mall. But instead of it being like one package it would be like 20 or more so he had to slide the packages in with rollers and go in load the Wally and get out to make sure he didn't miss any packages. He also had an air car to the right of the Wally sometimes. And that was all of the Next Day Air for our belt that left at 6:15 AM.

When I was in the sort aisle, Lou would always drag me out to look at Pen 6 and the missorts (packages that belong somewhere else, but end up on Pen 6). Most were for Pen 7, since they shared a belt in the sort aisle. If a sorter didn't push the package all the way over to the side of the belt it could fall over to Pen 6's side. I told Lou that loader #6 & #5 could just slide the packages over to Pen 7, there was a set of rollers there for this very purpose. He told me they shouldn't have to.

We also saw missorts for Pens 8 & 9 which were literally 20 yards away. So instead of carting them over to those belts. They carted the missorts to the return slide back to the sort aisle to be re-sorted. The belt travel time was about 7-10 minutes. Then the time to go from the sort aisle to the Pens varied from 5 minutes to 15 minutes. I told Lou that this was a waste of time. That it also caused major problems in the sort aisle.

The other big problem we had in the sort aisle was Pen 6 liked to turn off their belt. This caused problems in the sort aisle. Because if Pen 6 turned off their belt, then Pen 6 & Pen 7's belt stopped in the sort aisle causing back ups everywhere.

I also need to add that Pen 6 & Pen 7 were both Ontario belts (there was also Pen 5, but they weren't connected like 6 & 7). They had about 60 exception streets that sorters had to learn and memorize. Problem was that the on-road supervisors (in charge of the drivers) would change them without telling the pre-load sort (us).

I think it was my lack of compassion and understanding of load-sides problems that Lou sent me to the worst belt in the building. I dreaded it when I heard the news.

That's good for now. I will post part 2 which will explain what I did to change things around. And how Pen 6 should have been my stepping stone to better things (full-time), but for whatever reason it wasn't.