People: We make an effort to fully utilize each person’s talents, skills, diversity and creativity through personal development, team participation, training and coaching. We will build our culture on the fundamental assumption that people want to be successful. Inadequate and unclear processes, NOT PEOPLE, are generally the causes of problems. Each person must have the opportunity to grow and develop, to be heard, to make decisions and to be respected. Our people are our most valued strategic asset and it is only through the development of our people that we can build and ensure our future.
Customers: Our customers are the reason that we are here. We will focus not only on meeting our customer’s needs, but to partner with our customers and to help them to new heights of success. We are always interested in who they are and what they value so that we can exceed their expectations and create value that they may not be aware of today.
Continuous Improvement: Because world-class is a moving and changing target, we must practice kaizen, or continuous improvement. We not only need revolutionary improvements that enable Swift to leap forward, but also the evolutionary, or incremental, improvements.
Waste Reduction: All activities that do not add value to our services in the eyes of our Customers are considered waste. Our mindset is that waste is intolerable and we will constantly strive to eliminate all types of waste. As we do this, our people are freed from non-value adding activities to focus on value adding activities, thereby optimizing our productivity and increasing our success.
Process: We look at our Value Streams from beginning to end. The objective is to increase flow and to identify and eliminate mistakes, defects and non-value adding activities.
Sustainability: Improving our processes is not enough. We will ensure that the changes are sustainable through training employees and mistake-proofing.
Just-In-Time: We will strive to provide each customer—internal or external—with exactly what is needed, exactly when it is needed, and in the exact quantity needed.
Agility: Agility is the ability to change quickly and easily to meet a customer’s needs and expectations. In an environment of accelerating change it is crucial that the design of processes, training equipment etc, be quickly adaptable or customizable to new requirements.
Discipline: We will create a culture of discipline. We perform and manage our work in an exact way every time we do work. This increases our quality and makes problems and the identification of their causes more visible. It makes it easier for us to change and it helps us to make the best possible changes to meet our customer’s needs.
Problem Solving: When we see a problem, we stop and fix it. We do not band-aid it or keep it together with duct tape. We find the root cause and eliminate that cause so that we do not have to deal with that problem again. We believe that problems are best solved and improvements are best made at the point of the problem or improvement and not in the office. We are not interested in caring for the symptoms; we are looking to cure the disease.
Zero: Our mindset is to constantly strive for zero—zero dissatisfaction, zero injuries, zero inventories, zero WIP (Work in Process) zero defects and zero non-value adding activities.