Work Perfect

The day we strive for 

Joy Broom

Manager – industrial engineering
Florida Blue
Jacksonville, Fla.

My role primarily is dedicated to managing the execution of time studies, establishing work standards, and coordinating with my business partners ensuring systems are updated and our leaders are managing their resources to these standards. Industrial engineering, like the other departments at Florida Blue, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield company of Florida, practices lean principles and incorporates continuous improvement evaluations against our processes in an effort to be better than we were yesterday.

Industrial engineering is part of the Shared Services Division at Florida Blue. Shared Services is the support and administration team that Florida Blue’s contact unit utilizes to manage behind-the-scenes tasks like the budget. The role of industrial engineering here involves project leadership and the ability to provide subject matter expertise in support of business operations in the establishment and revalidation of production workload standards across the service organization.

The best part of my job is the end result I achieve; it allows me to truly affect change in our business, which in turn impacts our employees and members. I am privileged to support our workforce management team, which uses the standards I’ve helped establish to address resource needs.

A perfect day would include working with our contact area, reviewing their processes and realizing they are as lean as they can be until tomorrow, when we would want to ensure we were still lean.

I’m taking time to learn more about the operations in each area of the company, trying to understand what works well and what challenges exist as well as getting to know all of the products. I hope this experience, along with my previous experience as a certified coder, project manager and contract negotiator, will allow me to be recognized and appointed to represent our organization in a senior leadership role.

– Interview by David Brandt

David Brandt is the Web managing editor for IIE.