The Boots Suggestion Scheme

The collection, evaluation and implementation of ideas within the manufacturing areas of the factory buildings at Beeston (Nottingham) and Airdrie (Glasgow) goes back many years although records were only kept from 1986, when individual factory arrangements started to come together as a cohesive suggestion scheme. By 1993 this had been launched as a single scheme into the now familiar format of AIM (All Ideas Matter) on a single in-house software package run centrally from Beeston. The scheme had a ‘traditional’ rewards format with £25 Encouragement Awards, an Intangible Awards scale and Savings Awards (up to £15,000) based on a percentage of first year savings.


Up to 1992 the scheme format was ‘traditional’, with ideas being submitted on paper into a suggestion box. The collection of ideas then evolved with the introduction of ‘fold and post’ forms that use the company’s internal mail. Further technological advances were made possible by the purchase of an off the shelf ideas tracking software package. An in house Intranet Website was then introduced to add to the publicity & promotional options and provide up to date information for evaluators and submitters. This now allows both submitters and evaluators to have direct access to the software for submissions and for decisions on adoption. As a consequence paper usage has dropped considerably. Paper input is steadily being supplanted by on line input to the software database via the Intranet site and contributions via home e-mail.


In 2003 the pressures on the manufacturing areas increased and ‘Lean Manufacturing’ policies were introduced. Management saw that rewards for ideas cut across the way they wanted to effect lean manufacturing and the suggestion scheme was modified to remove most of the cash awards.


Up to this time the retail part of the company, Boots The Chemist, had resisted the introduction of a suggestion scheme. However, 2003 saw the arrival of a new CEO from ASDA who asked for the creation of a Stores Suggestion Scheme. Because at the time the company was downsizing and cutting costs, the scheme was set up without any rewards and rolled out to cover the whole company. Whilst a no reward scheme was well received in the new areas (without any expectation of reward), in the manufacturing departments the scheme died. However, to put this in perspective, at its peak the manufacturing scheme served around 5000 staff which is now little more than 1000 whilst retail staff number in excess of 60,000.


Since 2004 original retail scheme has expanded with the merger with Alliance Unichem and the merger of Boots Opticians with Dolland and Aitchison. Boots already had a strong recognition process, run by HR, and this has allowed AIM to evolve in a wider ideas arena. One of the key tools for our stores is their Intranet (MyStoreNet – MSN). Through this, ideas can be submitted and the opportunity was taken to also handle ‘feedback’ from that same source. The random nature of feedback, that the subjects mirror those of ideas and as we have used the same software has allowed us to exploit synergies to extract more ideas, reduce handling and provide better support for our colleagues most of whom are out in our stores.


The suggestion scheme is open to everyone, employees, contractors & in-house partners (eg IBM) in over 2500 locations, stores, warehouses and our two support offices at Nottingham and Feltham. There is an ongoing evolution of the scheme as it ‘infuses’ itself into the business. Short term projects and development often involve the scheme as a means to get creative input and through this and other activity the profile is kept high.


Whilst manufacturing ideas regularly brought in high tangible savings the nature of the retail environment keeps values low. What has been identified is that the existence of a route for colleagues’ ideas is in itself a major factor in colleague satisfaction. Management also value it as a means to improve communication, safety, working conditions, environmental impact and a greater overall involvement of each employee in the future success of the Company.


The scheme is also a model of low cost. Without rewards or expensive advertising the running costs are low, giving an ROI in excess of 5:1


For nearly 20 years Boots has been a member of ideasUK and has sponsored a trophy in the Annual Ideas Competition. We have notched up successes in poster competitions and ideas competitions and currently sponsor the Customer Service Trophy in the ideas competition. The evolution of the scheme has been done, not in isolation, but with the awareness of other schemes around the world through the association. In effect membership has varied frequently between taking and giving; taking advice and benchmarking with others and then sharing our experience for the benefit of others.


For more information contact:

Andy Beddows

Suggestion Scheme Manager

Boots
D90 East F08
Nottingham
NG90 1BS
0115 959 2653

aim@boots.co.uk

May I Suggest a Suggestion Scheme?

Here is an example of a document put together by a potential member organisation after taking part in an International Ideas Week event and talking to some of our members.

May I Suggest A Suggestion Scheme? - August 2009

This paper discusses staff suggestion schemes and some of the questions and answers gleaned from some research with organisations that currently use such schemes, for example Bupa, Diageo and Boots plus talking to the national charity that helps organisations with schemes, ideasUK.

What is a suggestion scheme?

A suggestion scheme (UK) or ideas programme (Europe/USA) is a mechanism for gathering ideas from employees to improve the business.

Who does it benefit?

If put together well, everyone! It can save the organisation hard money, make its systems and processes better & more cost effective, can make the working environment better and give employees recognition (maybe even reward) for their ideas.

Are there any rules we would need to follow?

Only where money is involved! One ‘unwritten rule’ that has been identified is that whilst you can start a scheme without any financial rewards (and add them later if you want), you cannot start with rewards and then take them away (there is hard evidence that this will kill a scheme). If you do give rewards the Taxman will let you pay so much tax free subject to certain conditions.

Do we need rules for the employees?

Some schemes have very complex rules but opinion seems to support simplicity. We should aim for less than a dozen rules. We could widen the scope in time by including the existing feedback cards as, whilst items submitted as suggestions can sometimes be no more than feedback, feedback can sometimes be a valuable suggestion.

What resource would we need to start a scheme?

With only xxx employees we are unlikely to be inundated with ideas so I believe that we could operate a scheme with the involvement of two people; an existing manager, to oversee the scheme and an existing Admin member of staff to enter idea submissions and progress letters from ideas.

Do we need systems?

Standard Life was recently quoted £xk for a software system and Boots are currently looking at systems between £xk and £xk. To be realistic we should simply put together an Excel spreadsheet to log the progress of each item. Added to this we should develop some standard letters to send: acknowledgement and final closure (used or not used), together with standard emails to send ideas to evaluators. With a little expertise in Word/Excel these letters could be personalised.

What is an evaluator?

We would need to identify some subject specialists to establish idea feasibility:

Process?

The ideas would be sent in via internal letter or email: Suggestion created > Suggestion sent via email > Entered into central database > Letter created for the contributor > Suggestion sent to subject specialists > Suggestion adopted yes/no > Further letter sent to contributor if successful


How do we promote the scheme and collect ideas?

We would promote through locally created posters (ideasUK may help us share from other organisations) and paper forms in staff areas plus the facility for employees to e-mail ideas from work or home to a scheme e-mail address. To help sustain interest in the scheme we could choose certain subject areas over the year (a monthly special every quarter).

Reward and/or recognition?

Certificates or Team Awards
• A good starting point for recognition is the presentation of for ideas that are used. This could also be extended to adopted suggestions receiving a certificate from the Chief Executive and photo put in the news letter.
Cash Reward
• In addition we could consider rewards but these would require a budget.
• Rewards could be a percentage of savings (eg 10% first year), a reward matrix (word description equated to cash) and these can be direct to an individual or into a collective ‘pot’ (‘gain sharing’) for all employees to share.
Prize draw
• All qualified suggestions would go into a hat (so to speak) and each quarter there would be a draw for three high street voucher £50 - £30 - £20

Do we give the scheme a name?

Yes, a name gives it some local ownership. Have a competition to find one or
‘borrow from another organisation: DODGI department of dam good ideas (Body Shop), GEMS (MoD), AIM all ideas matter (Boots), One Life (Bupa), Eureka (Various)

Another suggestion could be to initially launch a suggestion scheme by asking
staff to suggest a name.

Types of suggestion

Suggestions could be categorised
• Health and Safety improvements
• Reducing costs and overheads
• Improving the working environment
• Enhancing the student experience
• Improving customer service
• Improving quality

Value

Engaging with staff and encouraging them to participate would lead to increased staff morale levels and ownership, whilst giving an opportunity of enhancing staff general wellbeing.

CRB EUSA Aug 09

A Little look at Ricoh Products Ltd

The Ricoh Products Limited (RPL) Together Suggestion Scheme is not like most traditional employee suggestion programmes.

It is based on the premise that people really want to improve their work environment and contributions from every employee provide long term continuous improvement.

RPL understands that the employees doing the work are the experts when it comes to improving their process. Suggestions from employees ultimately contribute to the organisation’s profit but more importantly they give a sense of ownership with employees having some control over their destiny.

Also these feelings of ownership and control lead to greater overall employee satisfaction and engagement. The RPL Together Suggestion Scheme is not all about the money saved but aimed more at involving everyone in achieving the long term business objectives.

The key element of the scheme is that it is simple in all aspects from submitting an improvement idea through evaluation to implementation. The responsibility for implementing the ideas, rewarding and recognising the improvement being held at the lowest possible level in the organisation. In this way RPL is able to gain a reasonable number of submissions (2.1 ideas per employee in 2008/2009), high acceptance and implementation rate (77% in 2008/2009).

Every employee in RPL can submit a suggestion, although reward payments for certain management and specialist staff is limited to suggestions outside their scope of responsibility. Suggestions may be submitted by individuals or groups. The process is very simple and available electronically or in paper form.

A one page form is employed to capture all aspects of the improvement idea. A brief explanation of the current situation or problem together with the proposed improvement idea is included. The suggestor is responsible for determining which areas they think would be impacted by their idea. These include not only tangible cost saving but equally cover intangible benefits like productivity, safety, environment and quality improvement. Employees submit their forms to their team leader or scheme representative who will review it and ensure that the idea is understood and that any additional information is included on the form.

The team leader or scheme representative plays a key role in the scheme process. In most cases (80%) the team leader can approve, implement, recognise and reward all suggestions from the team using the RPL “Fast Track” process.

The team leader evaluates & approves all suggestions using a scoring matrix, when a suggestion scores high, the form is automatically processed along the RPL “Specialist Track” where further specialist evaluation is carried out and additional awards are made through an awards evaluation panel. The best ideas are further recognised and rewarded through monthly and annual awards from the RPL Top management.

In summary the RPL Together Suggestion Scheme is designed to be simple, intended for all employees to use, designed to remove barriers common to many suggestion schemes, most of all it creates a mind set that everyone contributes to the overall success and growth of the organisation by providing their ideas. Despite this focus on encouraging the small ideas, the RPL suggestion scheme has provided some significant payback and return on investment.

Although, never the key driver for the scheme, the scheme brought in a profit of over £147,000 to the organisation during 2008/2009.

Rob Bland - Continuous Improvement Manager

10 Great Ways to Crush Creativity

We had an e-mail Newsletter this morning from our good friend Paul Sloane at Destination Innovation it was a great newsletter and I thought I would share one of articles that Paul has highlighted regarding killing creativity in organisation.

Take a look and see what you think

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/management/ten-great-ways-to-crush-creativity.html

A big thank you to Paul for sending this on to us!

Focus on.........Tops Tips from Our Members

Aligning ideas promotions with project resource - Tara Keane, Nationwide Building Society

Evaluator's often reply 'good idea, but we don't have the resources to implement this currently', or 'good idea but we have just completed a project on xxx process, so it's unfortunate timing'. At Nationwide we are trialling an approach which aims to put link our ideas scheme, Brainwaves, with our corporate projects by doing the following:

* Working with the project management department (who run the major projects and programmes in Nationwide) to run Ideas Week promotions with either the top priority projects, or the projects which would most lend themselves to input from employees via Brainwaves.

* Brainwaves has been added to the project procedures, so project managers are encouraged to search for any ideas which may relate to the projects they are working on.

* The Brainwaves team are also working directly with project managers to send them ideas relating to key project topic areas.

Hopefully when people see the benefit of incorporating employee ideas into processes they are already resourced to look at, other project managers are more likely to do this in future.

We have just started this work and will send a further blog update when we get some results.


Tara Keane - Employee Engagement, Nationwide

It's Accreditiation Time again!

Well it is that time of the year again where you should think about applying for the ideasUK Accreditation.

Last year we had four organisations who ac hived the Platinum Level - Bupa, Identity and Passport Service, HSBC and Ricoh. Already this year we have organisations who have applied and these will be assessed in the next few weeks.

Once again for 2009 we will presenting the Accreditation awards at our Gala Awards Dinner on the 12th November 2009.

So what do you have to do to get your programme Accredited?

Well first take a look at the ideasUK toolbox within the members room of the website, within section 7 you will find the areas that we look during the assessment.

Our aim is to keep it simple and give your organisation a good chance of getting to the Bronze or Silver stage. Moving to Gold and Platinum will be more challenging.

What are the benefits of Accreditation?

It may look like an organisation is doing many things right. But they may be doing the wrong things. By visiting our membership we are able to see that you are doing the right things, as well as providing assistance and guidance in improving your scheme further.

Accreditation is also a validation of the programme managers skills, there are times when it is difficult to quantify what you as a manger are doing within the scheme. Gaining Accreditation from ideasUK gives you an external validation of what you are doing and also can give you some tips and techniques to ensure your programme is running the best it can.

So are there any costs?

There is a small cost to your organisation for the Accreditation, please contact us for more details.

Another great blog for you to have a look at!

One of our sponsors for the Idea of the Year award is Institiute of Management Services, while having a little look around thier great site earlier (http://www.ims-productivity.com/) I noticed they have thier own blog which covers all aspects of increasing productivity within organisations.

Take a look at http://blogprod.blogspot.com/ there are some great posts there and some good tips and techniques that you can use within your organisation.