One of the highlights this week was the implementation of a supermarket for packaging materials in one of our production halls. There are two production lines in the hall of which the new supermarket contains 21% en 84% of materials which the operators can pull for use. The warehouse checks and refills the supermarket daily. Reducing the need to order and check for available materials each shift reduces the workload for operators with 500 hours in sending and ordering materials per year. This excludes the hours of warehouse employees bringing and fetching wrong or excess materials. Unfortunately, I only calculated this advantage at this moment of writing. Employees feel that the number of days other production materials are needed than the ones currently at the supermarket are much higher than 16%, which led to resistance to the plans of implementing it. The lesson I therefore (re)learned this week is the importance of building a business case for improvement ideas based on facts instead of employee opinions only.
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