[The company now measures service levels two to three times a day, and the firm's stock is at its highest in four or five years.] There was a time of pain, ... Now we're back to normal service levels. So to the shareholders, we've been able to recover from the downturn. We haven't brought in more people or reduced the amount of work yet we're meeting our targets again.

198

We had no idea where we were starting and where we needed to go, so we started a field force approach to workforce optimization.

186

The project paid for itself in a single month. Every 30 minutes your gain is millions of dollars. It's effective when you work with a large workforce.

175

It was all over the papers. We had minimal service-level commitments. Customers were waiting days just to get their phones fixed. [They] were sending letters to regulatory agencies.

164

Management wasn't going to give us back those people, so we needed to work smarter. We were scrambling to figure out how we could make it up and do this. We knew the potential for gain was there. If we could move ourselves from five to six service calls a day, that would be a huge gain in productivity.

96

There was a time of pain. Now we're back to normal service levels. So to the shareholders, we've been able to recover from the downturn. We haven't brought in more people or reduced the amount of work yet we're meeting our targets again.

24