JCK Jewelry Show: Continuous Improvement Lab

Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only constant improvement and constant change. – Tom Peters

At Art Guild we face a lot of logistical challenges. Probably none as great as those presented by North America’s largest jewelry show, the annual JCK Jewelry Show in Las Vegas. Also our largest show of the year. There we set up and take down more than 400 standard and custom booths, mostly created from our unique SYMA system. These booths cover 65,000 square feet of floor space and require us to perfectly stage 40 truckloads of materials across 29 move-in zones.

The big logistical challenges presented by the show, and the consistency of show requirements year after year, make it a great testing ground for continuous improvement strategies.

These strategies focus primarily on reducing man hours – both I &D and electrical – and the reason this matters is that at times we have over 70 I & D laborers and 40 electricians on the floor.

As one example, instead of giving each electrician a stock of lights and other components, we began pre-delivering all required electrical components to each booth. We also continually refine our milestone-based management system. This system sets specific goals in set hour increments for each of the eleven days of setup (e.g., all walls up by noon) and quickly “red flags” problems for corrective action.

How are we doing? Pretty well. For the Hong Kong Pavilion – one of the largest group of booths – in just the past year we drove I & D and electrical hours down by 8% and 17% respectively.

Yoel Weiss, one of the JCK Show team members, said, “At Art Guild we always want to be better than we were before. The JCK show is a unique opportunity to learn how to do this, not only at the JCK show, but in all other areas of our business.”

The rest of the main JCK team includes Stan Hyams, Stan Huston, Todd Miller, Diane Sartini and Brian Robinson.