Launched in November 1992, the idea for the program came from Jerry Oliver, Vail’s vice president for corporate administration. He had participated in a similar program when he worked at a theme park in Houston several years ago.
Vail hired the St. Louis-based Maritz Performance Improvement Co. to administer the program and they in turn established 89 mostly interdepartmental teams of six employees each. The teams, made up mostly from the company’s 900 full-time employees with a few seasonal employees, were encouraged to use their creativity to the fullest extent in finding money-saving ideas.
The teams also had to investigate the practicality of their proposals. One team, for example, noted that all facsimile transmissions were copied onto hard paper before being circulated. Why not phase-out existing fax machines with newer models that use hard copy? they asked. They then talked with employees in charge of faxes and balanced the cost of the new machines with the time spent in making copies. Then they created a business plan, which was reviewed by one of eight three-person management evaluation committees. Proposals involving substantial investments were also reviewed by company officers.
“Mountains of Ideas” generated 163 ideas before the program ended in late winter. Of those, 55 ideas were approved, 52 were still being considered when the program ended in March and 56 were rejected.
Some ideas had to be tested before team members earned points and in a few cases, team members learned the ideas were already being used or were impractical. One such dud was a company credit union. Still other ideas made obvious sense and needed no trial. Points were awarded to team members for their ideas, based on the value of those ideas to the company.
One readily-accepted idea involved trucks used on the mountain in summer. They come equipped with plastic hubcaps that are affixed by eight lug nuts. The lug nuts were a nuisance (there was another set for the tires) when changing tires out in the field and, as a practical matter, employees tended to flip the plastic hubcaps into the cargo box, where they often got lost. Why not just take off the hubcaps, store them in boxes, then put them back on when the boxes for the pickups were completed? That simple idea is projected to save Vail Associates nearly $1,000.
Other ideas were designed to boost revenues for the company. For example, on-mountain cappuccino bars were quickly adopted and within weeks deemed successful.
Yet another idea, to recycle antifreeze, required purchase of a $5,000 machine that would pay for itself in five years. The recycling will have the amount of new antifreeze needed, reduce disposal costs, and enhance Vail’s image for being environmentally friendly. This back-shop idea earned green points.
Andy Rogstad, supervisor of fleet maintenance, said many employees were initially skeptical of “Mountains of Ideas,” but then found it fun as well as rewarding. “The program gave people the incentive to ask the question,” he said. “The incentive wasn’t there before. That’s the point of the program — to take a look at your own department and look at other departments, and make departments ask questions about themselves.”
Rogstad, who also earned points for being an implementation manager on several projects, combined his points with those of his wife, Peggy, also a VA employee. After scrutinizing the program’s catalog of merchandise, they ordered a computer printer, a 32-inch color TV and personal items, such as a watch.
Tamara Underwood, a lawyer for VA, likened the point system to Green Stamps, the promotional tool used by grocers several decades ago. She now has a new cordless phone, a gas grill, a vacuum cleaner and a stereo. “That’s not bad for having fun with some of your friends from the company, sitting around and talking about ideas,” she said. Her team members included a financial planner, a marketer, an employee from the slopes and trails department and four people from operations. They were given company time to work on projects, but mostly the brainstorming came after hours.
She, too, noted skepticism at the start, but endorsed the program’s format. “I can see how somebody who had no relationship to the food department might have an idea one day and say, ‘Well, I don’t know who to talk to,’ and then just forget it.” With “Mountains of Ideas,” they could put such ideas into practice.
According to the format worked out by Maritz Performance, 25 to 30 percent of the cost savings or revenue increases are returned to employees in the form of prizes. So far, according to VA’s Oliver, the company has realized 75 percent of the program’s benefits, with another $500,000 to $600,000 to be realized in years to come.
In retrospect, he believes that launching the program at the start of ski season was too ambitious. Late spring or early summer might have been better. He figures the value of the program at three years. “The thing we learned is that there are ways to tap into the employees’ creativity. Whether it’s as formalized as this again, we’ll have to wait and see,” he said.
Oliver said the consulting firm’s fee was $100,000 to train team leaders, work with the teams in creating business plans and doing investigations and to assist management evaluation committees in assessing the value of ideas submitted. He said it might be possible for smaller ski areas to form teams and institute do-it-yourself programs along these lines.
Greg Graham, account manager for Maritz Performance, said the company usually works with larger employers, but has done some jobs with as few as 40 employees. The program requires a significant amount of resources in a company, he said, although smaller operations could use a similar process.
Brian McCartney, manager of mountain operations on Vail Mountain, said the creativeness and free-thinking fostered by Mountain of Ideas probably could be applied in smaller ski operations. “Somebody has to be in charge, and there has to be a structure,” he said. “But I don’t think it has to be horribly complicated.”
Whatever structure is devised for receiving, reviewing and implementing ideas and then rewarding employees for proposing those ideas, that structure must be adhered to. “You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game.” McCartney suggests carefully thinking through the criteria in advance.
He also stresses that the program, no matter how it is organized, must result in some ideas being tried. If management accepts no ideas, that’s bad for morale.
The most difficult aspect of the program is discouraging ideas that are too grandious in scale. “The average employee’s ability to research grandiose plans is limited, and certainly time consuming,” said McCartney. But if, in a smaller company of 30 employees, each employee had an idea worth $1,000, that is a substantial savings. He cited an example from the airline industry, where a flight attendant noticed that most of salad trays were returned with the tomatoes untouched. Small tomatoes, big savings.
