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Vol 30 - No 01 - February 2004 Branch news: South West: Production Processes – ‘Games’ for Training What were twenty grown men doing rowdily trying to assemble domestic plugs as fast as they could at Kohler Mira’s factory in Cheltenham just before Christmas? Some sort of Office party? A bet? No, it was the culmination of a very interesting and informative meeting organised by the South West Branch on 18th December to look at ways in which we could model production processes to allow people to play with them, see how they work and learn how to improve them in a safe environment. Learning by doing without crashing the works. We had excellent presentations illustrating two approaches to this conundrum. Firstly Bob Irwin walked us through the ROME virtual lawn mower factory, and showed how the visual clues to the problems the business was suffering led directly to the training materials for the skills required to solve them. These in turn led to interactive demonstrations of the principles and finally to opportunities to apply them in anger to test cases. We only had time to scratch the surface of this comprehensive training tool, but it was apparent that it was admirably designed to support self learning. The impressive success rates that students had achieved with it, as described by Bob, could be easily understood. Leading us from individual computer based training to highly practical team learning Phil Townsend of the South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (SWMAS) got us all playing their ‘Plug Game’. Work stations established around the room and for 5 minutes we desperately tried to assemble batches of plugs to satisfy our customer. This allowed us all to see that the process was horribly out of balance and the batch production flooded our factory with WIP but failed to deliver a single plug. Phil then offered to let us change something – but only one thing at a time. Did we want to sort out the layout? Adopt single piece flow? Balance the processes? Obviously everyone knew the right answer, but interestingly they were all different. Phil finally got sufficient agreement for us to do something (reducing batch size) and off we went again with slightly more success – but still more or less a shambles. After each round we were allowed to improve another element and gradually we got slicker, the customer better served and our factory more profitable. In the subsequent debate we concluded that both approaches were excellent training tools. The hands on practicality of the plug game had an immediate impact which would be hard to resist, whilst exploring the ROME environment would clearly make extensive learning relatively painless and interesting. Obviously, a complementary pair. We finished off the morning with an interesting tour of the Kohler Mira shower production facility and a very pleasant lunch – thanks to them for their hospitality. Duly refreshed we all dispersed to apply the lessons earned in our own work places. Related Topics:
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