Page 300 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Our motto for QFS is Solving
Business Problems. And that’s what we do.
– Erin Sorgel, black belt and deployment champion (2007-17); current CFO, Peterson-Cat
Product Link administrator. “The skills you acquire in that training and the experience of Six Sigma itself follows you for the rest of your life. The con- cept of cause-and-effect is one of the things that really stuck. I think more about what I’m going to do now and who it’s going to affect further down the line because everything I do affects other peo- ple.”
Erin Sorgel as QFS deployment champion in June 2010
Contract Service Agreements: Erin Sorgel (2008)
Erin Sorgel’s first project on Contract Service Agreements (CSA) has delivered significant fi- nancial results across the company since 2008. It centered on additional repairs that show up during routine, preventive maintenance inspections. “Those additional opportunities were just sitting around waiting for attention, which was revenue we weren’t capitalizing on,” says Sorgel. “So we put together a team of inside sales reps (ISR) respon- sible for quoting and follow-through on all that extra work. The CSA project generated a lot of
process efficiencies plus a number of new software programs to help manage the process.” In 2019 alone, CSAs yielded 540 quotes for just under $2 million companywide, with another $2.1 million waiting for approval.
“Six Sigma is about being open-minded and look- ing at things from a fresh perspective in an un- biased way,” says Sorgel. “Our team used data to validate the need for an ISR. We looked at how long it took to quote the work, how much work the current parts and service sales reps (PSSRs) had, what the average revenue would be per work order, and how many we thought we could win versus how many we quoted. All that data proved that we could cover the cost of an ISR and make money if we set up a solid quoting and follow-up process. Our motto for QFS is Solving Business Problems. And that’s what we do.”
298 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG