Incentive Programs at Semco - Improving Our Graphite Manufacturing Performance
At Semco, we have always looked at ways to improve our graphite manufacturing performance through the adoption of the most up-to-date technologies, computerized systems, and machines. Also, we have always been at the forefront of adopting the newest, best, raw materials for graphite fabrication. We also seek out and hire the best people to do this work. With such great engineers, machinists, and clerical staff, we feel it would only be logical and fair to reward great performance. Doing so also helps our bottom line. Thus, we have implemented a variety of programs that incentivize our workforce to perform at their highest level. We just concluded our first year of one of these programs, and we are heartened by how effective the program was and how well our employees responded to it.
The idea of this particular program was to incentivize quality and timely work by rewarding our employees in PTO (Paid Personal Time Off). We set certain targets in rejection rates and on- time delivery. Although these targets were ambitious, it was our hope that our employees could achieve them. Our technological systems allow advanced key performance indicator (KPI) monitoring to generate annualized on-time delivery performance reports as well as rejection costs. After compiling the results of the inaugural incentive program for the past 12 months, we discovered that our on-time delivery was 95.5+%, and rejection rates were below 1% of sales revenue. We are proud of our employees for achieving these results since they are well above industry standard for on-time delivery and well below industry standard for rejection rates.
True to our mission at Semco, we will not stop trying to get better just because we achieved such impressive results last year. Our graphite manufacturing business is complex and multifaceted, and there are always things we could do better in order to provide our customers with the highest quality and most efficient graphite fabrication services. 2019 was great, and we are looking for an even better 2020. One of our goals is to get even closer to 100% on-time delivery and to achieve a continuous improvement in rejection costs. And we want to do all this while showing our employees even more appreciation. This year, our incentive program led Semco to reward a total of 31 shop staff personnel a grand total of 419 hours of PTO -- that's 10+ weeks! Congratulations to these employees. Their hard work and participation in this program have helped us to learn much over the past year that we at Semco can use to push our graphite fabrication operation to the next level.