It’s NOT about the staples!

Even though this story is about paper, we don’t want you to miss out on the fun.

An ag client had an emergency. Roughly 200 boxes that needed to be processed in less than one month. Normally not that daunting, but did I mention these were ag documents?  And what does that mean? Staples!  Staples!  More staples than you could shake a stick at.  You might be saying, “What’s more banal than staples?”  Well, it isn’t really about staples.  But, it is all about staples.  Staples turned out to be the one thing slowing us down.  Our run-time per box was 4.0 - 4.5 hours, when it needed to be 2.5 or lower.  Staples were the roadblock.  Conquering the staples became the mission.  If it hasn’t happened already, I won’t bore you with how we did it.  I will say we cut our run-time to 2.25 in 48 hours.  We continued to improve the process and dropped that number to 2.0.  This project was like sprinting through a marathon.  Ridiculous at the outset, but simply what needed to be done. There was no choice.  The one-month deadline was thought at first to be… Impossible. There, I said it.  I hate that word.  With tenacity and excellent team cohesion, we beat the deadline by five days.