Premium Uniforms & Textile Products is a Toronto company that supplies workplace uniforms and service wear. It has an experienced team that knows its work very well. An order can pass through customer service, purchasing, production, the warehouse and accounting before it is paid for.
This year Premium decided to build on that experience. They wanted to keep enhancing their processes and documentation, and chose to create an Operations Handbook: one place that describes how the business runs, from the first quote to the last payment. We built it with them. This is the first in a short series about the project. It is about the people who made it work: the Premium team, and the three of us who worked alongside them.
Starting with how the business really works
We did not start with software or with a template. We started by asking the people who do the work how it gets done.
The first thing we produced was a set of documents describing the business as it is today, from the customer-facing side to the back office:
- Quote to order: where customer relationships and orders begin.
- Order to cash: fulfillment, invoicing and getting paid.
- Fulfillment and production: how garments are routed and sorted before they ship.
- Warehouse: picking, packing and shipping.
- Purchasing: buying finished goods and raw materials.
- Accounting and finance: the controls that keep the books right.
These were written for management first, so leadership could check the facts before anything went further. Then we went department by department and turned each area into procedures the team could use.
One team, three specialists
No single person could have written this Handbook well. Each area of the business needed someone who had run that kind of work before, so the project was shared between Metadata's principal advisor and two of our strategic partners.
Fateh AlNaeb, Founder and Principal Advisor at Metadata Advisory, led the project. He mapped the business as it runs today with Premium's leadership, kept the work moving through a weekly team meeting, and checked every procedure for gaps in who is responsible for what. He then turned the finished procedures into the online Handbook the team signs in to.
Deanne Kelleher, founder of KAOS Group, is our process specialist. She designed the format every procedure follows: a short summary of the process, the step-by-step how-to, the decision rules kept separate so the steps stay easy to read, and a place to capture the improvements people asked for along the way. She led the work on sales, shipping and finance, and ran the sessions where those procedures were checked with the people who own them.
Kim Lafreniere, founder of ProcurelyIQ, is our inventory and supply chain specialist. She led the work on production and the warehouse, the parts of the business where garments are sorted, picked and shipped, and worked with the production team on the final check of their workflows.
Each of us wrote in our own area, and each of us read the others' work. Questions that crossed two areas, like a handoff between production and shipping, were settled together before the procedure went to the client for review.
Credit where it belongs
A Handbook like this is only as good as the time people give to it, and the Premium team gave a lot of it.
They made time for us between orders, during their working day, in a business that does not slow down. They walked us through how things are really done, including the exceptions and the know-how that only experience teaches. And they checked every procedure until it matched what happens on the floor, not what someone thought should happen.
That last step took real time. Confirming each procedure with the person who owns it meant a number of onsite sessions, and it was worth it. A procedure that the process owner has read and confirmed is one people trust. A procedure written from a desk is one people ignore.
What the Handbook covers
The finished Handbook is an online site the team signs in to. It is organized the same way as our sample Handbook:
- Procedures: the steps for each task, who does each one, the system it happens in, and what to do when something is different.
- Roles: each person's responsibilities and the procedures that apply to them, so a new hire knows what to read first.
- Journeys: one piece of work, like a customer order, followed across every team it touches, with the handoffs between them.
- Systems: which tools each step depends on.
Access is by role. Management can see everything, including finance. People in purchasing, customer service and the other teams sign in and see the parts that apply to their work.
How the team uses it
When the project wrapped up, Saad Khimani, Premium's Operations Controller, put it this way:
We are very impressed with the output. We will spend the time reviewing the Handbook and improving processes on our end. Your team's contributions are greatly appreciated.
That is exactly what a Handbook is for. Once the work is written down in one place, it becomes a base the team can keep building on: refining steps, training new people and sharing what each team knows across the business.
It also helps with the everyday. When someone in purchasing needs to check how a task is done, they open the Handbook instead of asking whoever happens to be free.
What we learned
A few things from this project apply to almost any business thinking about writing down how it runs:
- Start with how the work is done today. Not how it should be done, and not how a software company says it could be done.
- Put a specialist on each area. Someone who has run a warehouse asks different questions from someone who has run a finance team, and both sets of questions matter.
- Sit with the people who do the work. The managers know the shape of the process. The people doing it know the exceptions.
- Have every procedure confirmed by its owner. It takes longer, and it is the reason people trust what they read.
- Write it in the words the team already uses. A Handbook nobody recognizes will not get opened.
Thank you
We are grateful to the whole Premium Uniforms team for their time, their patience and their honesty about how the work really gets done. The Handbook is theirs as much as ours.
If you want to give your own business the same foundation, our Operations Handbook service starts exactly where this project did. You can also explore the sample Handbook to see what the finished result looks like, or meet the team behind it.
Facing this now?
Operations Handbook
How your business actually runs, written down in one place your team can search, instead of living in one or two heads.