Manufacturing knowledge and skills

Organisational Development
The key issue here is for a new approach to the company’s corporate strategy, and more importantly their manufacturing strategy. How is the company going to successfully transfer its operations from low volume production to mass production and what tools and techniques will be employed? Is is just as lucrative to move into low value, high volume work as it is to do high value, low volume work? Has make Vs buy been investigated? There needs to be a dual approach:

1. Lean Manufacturing Principles – for example, the integration of techniques into normal working practices such as set up reduction to reduce costs, the use of process flow analysis to improve key processes such as lead times, awareness by employees of the cost of quality (eg, scrap and rework,etc) and to train employees in these techniques. There needs to be a continuous improvement culture perhaps using small Kaizen teams.

2. Too often companies wishing to progress focus on the technical issues, but it is equally if not more important to address the people issues. The only factor that will make this transition a success is the people. Firstly, is there a culture for change amongst employees from shop floor to management team? Once this is established, then an assessment needs to be made whether there are the appropriate skills at all levels to drive the changes forward. A long term training and development plan in line with corporate and manufacturing strategy will be needed.

Project Plans will obviously need to be compiled involving all those affected to ensure that ‘things’ happen within the required timescale.

An appropriate communication strategy will be required to underpin all the above. Without this, plans can fail.

While the Company is doing all the good things above, production still needs to be maintained and therefore the biggest investment is not financial, but time and this needs to be recognised from the start.

3 Responses

AnonymousUser says:

August 7, 2000 at 11:31 am

TNA and Appraisal
If your clients are expanding from a small company and increasing their number of empoyees, one thing they will need to consider is a structured approach to performance appraisal and Training Needs Analysis. We have produced easy to use toolkits to help businesses implement a skills based performance appraisal system that can be adapted to any requirement, and another that covers TNA’s. These are just £75 each. For more information visit our website at http://www.pdc-online.co.uk.
User deleted says:

August 7, 2000 at 9:58 pm

Is your goal to build/improve business via Process thinking and
If your goal is grow the learning and secure strong progress on understanding “the process” to allow it to become predictable and thus let it grow confidently then I would be interested in helping you.
AnonymousUser says:

August 9, 2000 at 12:58 pm

Organisational Development
The key issue here is for a new approach to the company’s corporate strategy, and more importantly their manufacturing strategy. How is the company going to successfully transfer its operations from low volume production to mass production and what tools and techniques will be employed? Is is just as lucrative to move into low value, high volume work as it is to do high value, low volume work? Has make Vs buy been investigated? There needs to be a dual approach:

1. Lean Manufacturing Principles – for example, the integration of techniques into normal working practices such as set up reduction to reduce costs, the use of process flow analysis to improve key processes such as lead times, awareness by employees of the cost of quality (eg, scrap and rework,etc) and to train employees in these techniques. There needs to be a continuous improvement culture perhaps using small Kaizen teams.

2. Too often companies wishing to progress focus on the technical issues, but it is equally if not more important to address the people issues. The only factor that will make this transition a success is the people. Firstly, is there a culture for change amongst employees from shop floor to management team? Once this is established, then an assessment needs to be made whether there are the appropriate skills at all levels to drive the changes forward. A long term training and development plan in line with corporate and manufacturing strategy will be needed.

Project Plans will obviously need to be compiled involving all those affected to ensure that ‘things’ happen within the required timescale.

An appropriate communication strategy will be required to underpin all the above. Without this, plans can fail.

While the Company is doing all the good things above, production still needs to be maintained and therefore the biggest investment is not financial, but time and this needs to be recognised from the start.