MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS BASE BARSTOW, Calif. -- For those who thought Benny Suggs had passed away - that's Beneficial Suggestion Program by the way - guess again.
During the last few months, Maintenance Center Barstow has managed to raise the Benny Suggs Program from its dormant state to a full-fledged working program that is paying off again for its employees.
The program "is designed to take advantage of the creativity of military and civilian personnel to contribute practical and innovative ideas for improving and maintaining productivity, economy, efficiency, and mission effectiveness," states MARCORLOGBASESO 12450.2H.
If ideas and suggestions are adopted and put into use, the person who made the submission can get paid.
"During our review of the of Beneficial Suggestion Program, in June of last year, Fred Alley (supervisor, Quality Department) asked myself and Lisa Garcia to perform an audit of the Beneficial Suggestion process to find out what was wrong with it," said Tom Cooper, process improvement specialist at MCB.
According to Cooper, what the team found was the Benny Suggs Program was going through too many channels, most employees were unaware suggestions could be filed online. The audit results found the process was broken and ineffective, the audit also found 15 suggestions awaiting review, some from as far back as 1999.
"The employees submitting these ideas were getting discouraged and frustrated having to wait so long to find out the status of their submission," said Cooper.
To fix the problem, the team contacted Shirley Stiles in Albany who said it would be much more effective to have the Benny Suggs submitted to LogCom directly, because in the end it must go to them for final evaluation as well as approval.
"When we did that.we came up with a process to help people file them on line. Now it goes directly back to Albany," he said. "They do all the investigations and if they need help they will contact the supervisor, project manager, or other contacts they need the information from, to say whether it's good or bad and it (the process) happens a lot faster."
Cooper said the best thing about having the program on line is that if anyone wanted to find out the status of a suggestion, they can do it several ways. They can type in the commodity, if the suggestion relates to a piece of equipment like an LAV, and all the suggestions related to LAVs will come up showing who has looked at the suggestion, who made the submission and whether the suggestion was approved or disapproved.
Personnel can also do a search by name or organization.
"So the beautiful thing about this is that the employee can submit a suggestion from home, he can also go down to the library here, use the computers and the personnel will assist the employee as needed," said Cooper. "It's a lot better than sitting doing a lot of paperwork as had to be done in the old process with a lot of middlemen."
If a person wants to submit a suggestion simply go to the Web site, at www.logcom.usmc.mil/benesuggs/, fill in the blanks and submit the suggestion. When submitting the idea, information should include the problem, suggested change, where and how it can be used and what it will accomplish, according to Cooper.
"There are things that we know, from past experience, that they need to put in there," he said. "Like how many hours did it save, what would be the cost to fabricate a tool, etc. because the person doing the evaluation will need this information to provide a good evaluation."
With this capability, the time it takes to submit a suggestion and get it approved or disapproved has been cut down quite considerably. It also motivates employees to want to make a suggestion, said Cooper. "Whereas this process is a whole lot faster and, in a sense, it's instant gratification, because as soon as it's posted the person can get on the site and say 'well, they're working on it'."
Since this process has been instituted MCB has received about 15 - 20 new Benny Suggs, the old backlog is being worked through and some employees that were awaiting awards for their previous suggestions have been paid.
"The frustration we were having getting people to turn in Benny Suggs has taken a 180, we are now getting money and time saving suggestions again"