The concept of on-site management originated from the quality management of the production process. It refers to the method of managing personnel, equipment, materials, production processes, production environment and information through standardization, visual management and Kanban management at the manufacturing site of the production department. For Amazon’s operations, the method of on-site management is still applicable, except that the equipment has become a computer and the product is information.
Some managers think that on-site management means that they must be present to manage in person, which is actually a misunderstanding of on-site management. In essence, on-site management is actually the establishment of a set of optimization ideas and methods to achieve continuous updating of management itself through the PDCA cycle.
The PDAC cycle is essentially a way of thinking that takes small steps and runs fast and iterates quickly. Many sellers have such troubles, that is, they don’t know why their links are good, and they don’t know why a certain model of theirs is poor. If it is an individual operator, then it is enough to be performance-oriented, but when it comes to leading a team, you must have a set of clear ideas. Since team management involves many factors, the gap between the goal and the current situation is often the result of many problems. Therefore, it is more necessary to continuously improve by controlling variables in order to make the current situation closer to the goal.
The “plan” in the PDCA cycle may also be a “hypothesis”. Through “execution”, enough data is accumulated to “check” whether the hypothesis is correct, and the next round of “action” is carried out according to the results. For example, the manager found that the average performance of women in the team that month was better than that of men, so he made the assumption that “women are more suitable for Amazon operations”. But at this time, it is only a speculation based on short-term performance data and cannot be used as a basis for future team recruitment. At this time, the manager believes that in addition to gender factors, there are also influences from work experience, on-the-job training and educational level. Therefore, the manager developed a sales performance tracking form to record the personal situation of team members and the performance changes of the stores they are responsible for in the past 6 months. After data analysis, it was found that the correlation between performance and gender is weak, but the correlation with work experience and on-the-job training is strong. At this time, a PDCA cycle is declared complete. According to the conclusions drawn, the manager can give priority to hiring experienced operators in the subsequent selection process, and conduct concentrated training for operators with average performance.
When the team is relatively small, such as less than three or five people, managers can also work with team members and use the PDCA cycle to follow up on everyone’s work at any time; but once the team expands, it is bound to lead to insufficient energy for managers and inability to track the work results of each team member in real time. At this time, it can be divided into smaller teams according to professional fields to carry out their own on-site management.
After clarifying the management ideas, managers need to form a closed-loop thinking in daily management work, so that everything has an account, everything has a place, and everything has a response.
Everything has an account, which means that there are clear indicators for the specific work of each day and the goals to be completed, which is the beginning of the plan. Every day, managers need to confirm the work tasks and processes with the team in advance, make clear rewards and punishments, formulate clear assessment standards, and give fair and open feedback and basis for the results after the assessment period. Everything has a place, which means feedback on the progress of work according to the established time plan or agree on a fixed time period. Don’t keep all plans verbal, don’t implement them, and don’t execute them in place. After execution, problems that were not considered in the early stage will inevitably be exposed, which is a good thing for long-term management.
Responding to everything means checking and solving problems reported by team members in a timely manner, and trying out suggestions as far as possible. Communication between teams is particularly important if you want to improve overall business capabilities. Managers need to fully understand the needs and obstacles and find corresponding solutions. Once questions or suggestions raised by team members go unanswered for too many times, everyone will gradually lose the desire to communicate, and problems will accumulate and thinking will become rigid, which is undoubtedly fatal to a team.