The Brickman Group

TOC for Production applied to a service industry

The Brickman Group is one of the largest landscaping companies in the United States. Sixty percent of Brickman's business is landscape maintenance; the other 40 is landscape installation. It was a well-managed company whose management knew could do better. In February 1996 the Brickman Group began its "refinement process" using TOC.

The TOC journey started with about 90 middle- and upper-management personnel reading The Goal. Most agreed that the TOC concepts made sense, but they didn't know how to translate them from the production environment to their landscaping business.

In March 1996 Brickman managers went through a Production Application program, where they learned how to apply TOC for Production to landscaping. They began to understand that the constraint was not necessarily something negative that should be avoided, but that it may be the most profitable part of the business - and if they could control the constraint they could then control profitability. It was realized that work was being done in batches and that local optimum was the focus.

Mowing was identified as the constraint. That task was then pulled out of the batch of work, which included the detail-work of fertilizing, weeding, watering, and trimming. Making mowing a stand-alone task revealed excess capacity, improved efficiency, and enabled Brickman to make and meet schedules - something it had trouble with in the past. Customer satisfaction increased.

The next step in the TOC journey involved 12 members of upper management going through the Jonah Program^®. This pointed out the need to outline the processes that occur within Brickman in order to establish consistency and standardization throughout the company, to identify and address the conflicts which occur, and to work on scheduling and the misalignment of resources.

The ongoing TOC journey at Brickman has taught them some valuable lessons:

• Don't change too many processes too quickly - people need to adjust
• Everyone doesn't learn and accept change at the same speed
• Document the existing processes and share the planned changes with the staff - involving them in the creation of the Current Reality Trees and Future Reality Trees provides everyone with a sense of involvement, understanding and ownership
• For Brickman, TOC was a "refinement process" - this made it easier for personnel to accept the change as something more than a fad, especially as a company which was doing well prior to TOC
• Measure and share results with other departments and divisions - all can learn from each other's experience
• Appeal to all the senses - different people respond to learning and changing in different ways, provide the information in different formats - video, books, simulators, etc.

The results at Brickman since implementing TOC:

• Dramatic increase in customer satisfaction due to factors which include being able to make and meet scheduling commitments.
• 20% increase in client base with only a 12-13% increase in staff.
• Minimum 50% increase in the bottom line.

A representative of The Brickman Group presented the company's story at the Jonah^SM Upgrade Workshop in November 1998. That presentation is available on video (JMT-4).