Anton Grutter
‘Best practice” is aimed at involving workers in problem-solving on the shopfloor. And judging by the reaction to the first workshops organised by the Manufacturing Roundtable at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, the concept is popular with workers and management alike.
Many studies have shown that team-based problem-solving can be an effective way of building continuous improvement into day-to- day work methods, boosting productivity. The difficulty is how to implement it on a sustainable basis.
To learn the art of shopfloor worker self- management, a Japanese industry consultant, Takeyuki Furuhashi, came to South Africa to conduct a workshop. His involvement was made possible with the help of the Association of Overseas Technical Scholarships, a Japanese government industrial aid organisation.
The workshop was hosted by Plessey SA. Workshops are conducted at the premises of host companies so the participants are able to do practical projects on the factory floor.
The emphasis during the workshop was literally on learning-by-doing. After an introduction to the methods used by shopfloor teams in Japan, the participants were divided into teams and put to work on real production problems.
They had to trace work flows, count work in progress and identify bottlenecks, all the while keeping in mind the principles of good shopfloor practice according to the 5S housekeeping model, visual management, and elimination of waste.
One problem for any shopfloor management programme, is that the workers involved have to be confident enough to take responsibility for implementing improvements.
But attaining this goal was illustrated when one of the participants in the programme, Sean de Kock, a supervisor from Warner Lambert, started applying what he had learnt after the second day.
He would get together with his fellow workers each day after the workshop ended, and implement a version of subjects covered. Instead of taking photographs to back up the project team’s recommendations, as at Plessey, he filmed the problem areas in his department on video.
A member of his team, Winston Pasquale, commented that they now had concrete evidence to back their recommendation for certain changes to their machinery. Not surprisingly, the required modifications were being made a week after the workshop.
Anton GrUtter is a research associate of the Manufacturing Roundtable at the Graduate School of Business, UCT