The Corner Office: How Hachette Book Group Measures Success
• How do you approach the company’s distribution strategies?
Ford: In distribution, I would say we have a highly efficient platform. I’m very impressed, having been [on] the operating side of many businesses throughout my career. … One of the things I talked about with Gerry Cummings, our senior vice president of distribution, was his engineering standards and what his unit-costs metrics looked like. When you start a new role, you ask questions of the leaders who are new to you, and sometimes you can get some resistance. … I’ve been very impressed with the team there. … Gerry energetically updated his standards, and it helped him. … These standards measure how many units should be picked per hour, for instance, or how many pallets can be offloaded from a truck per hour. Standards such as these are very granular and allow Gerry and his team to then match their staffing levels to known rates for different work centers. When Gerry did that, in some areas standards got more rigorous. This drove a reduction in the number of personnel he thought he might need to hire for work during the year and had a direct impact on cost and bottom-line performance in the business. … It will help us be more efficient in the future.