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We are going to wrap up transportation month with a bit of twisting and turning. Since it is a five week month as far as the Nip Impressions column goes, I will exercise a bit of a writer's privilege and take you back to a few weeks ago when we described logistics in the military as lines of communications, only this time we will actually talk about communications.

Over my career, the best operating mills and companies I have seen have had very open communications. In these systems, there is a culture encouraging communications between departments and between mills. Conversely, the worst I have seen have been those with a fortress mentality, both internally to a site, between departments and externally to the site, between mills. The worst I have ever seen was in a company making grades in declining markets. The mills saw each other as every bit as big a competitor as the mills actually belonging to competitors.

In one company I have worked with, I persuaded them to have a brief meeting between the outgoing crew and the one coming in that had been on a break between shift rotations. This brought the incoming team up to date on what had been going on while they were gone.

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In another company, they use one day a week to have conference calls between various levels in all departments among their mills within the same grade. I'll make it up, but for example, all the mill managers for liner mills have a call at 9 am every Wednesday. They discuss what has been going on, what problems they are having and how they can deal with those. HR, Safety, Maintenance, and so forth and so on have calls at designated times on that day, too. On top of that, their management system is open enough that they can see each other's operations in real time as the machines are running. Not only does this allow them to help one another, it sets up a friendly rivalry. I view such a culture something like professional sports. They do "trade players" around for career enhancement, so while a player is on a certain team (mill) they are loyal to that team, but as they move around they can take their expertise with them. Thus, there is a bit of resident experience from all of their mills in each of their mills, if that makes sense. This company also has an overtime shift at the end of each shift's run in a particular slot where they do training. I have seen other companies add an hour to every shift for training--some of the best communications.

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Of course, we are in the thick of things, too, on trying to help you have excellent technical help. We have the Tech Center Show on Pulp & Paper Radio International each Monday at 11 am USEST (it is a call-in show, but you can listen to it any time). You can also send in your questions for us to answer there to techcenter@paperitalo.com.

Communications is important. It is important in your mill and it is important here as we try to help you excel in your job for your company and as you burnish your career.

How can we help you? You can take our quiz on line this week to report on your communications experiences and offer suggestions as to how we might help you communicate better.

For safety this week, we know that besides attitude, communications is paramount to operating a safe facility.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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