I spent the morning with Raquel – a production engineering student who has worked here for one year. She gave me a tour of the shopfloor, focussing on the lean aspects. Safe to say, I was very impressed. While the machines aren’t the newest or the most capable, the lean systems are incredible. Not only is a textbook infrastructure in place, it seems to be being properly utilised; modelled heavily on the Toyota Production System (TPS), true pull systems are used throughout the factory with visual management as a key element of the system. They use KPIs that I have only ever seen described in textbooks (which are ALL updated on a daily basis…) and the operators all understand what they mean. The use of primary colours to identify zones and important items makes it look more like a Teletubbies set than a factory. They have supermarkets with dedicated delivery trucks to take raw material and WIP to the cells; shared toolboxes at the end of each cell and, perhaps the most visually effective, “defect mats”. These look something like the sketch below (unfortunately I’m not allowed to take my camera onto the shopfloor, so you’ll have to put up with my diagrams!):
Raquel said that some of the shopfloor think that lean is just corporate nonsense, but for the large part, I think they’ve achieved a successful buy-in. Everyone does exercises in the mornings, there’s an HSBC branch on the shopfloor (?!) and there’s a definite feeling of employee satisfaction. (And did I mention, there was a musician playing guitar in the canteen? How lovely!)
However, despite this rosy picture that I am painting, the factory is far from perfect. The figures on the KPI boards for things such as On-time Delivery and Defect rates were fairly erratic. I think a closer inspection may be required. Whilst much of the shopfloor is a textbook example of how to implement lean systems, other parts of it are a textbook example of what happens when it is only implemented in certain areas of the supply chain.
Anyway, I’m writing this whilst sat in little café eating chocolate torte and enjoying the sunshine. It’s a hard life.
sophieignitesherfuture 