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Vol 30 - No 05 - July 2004 Branch news: London - Stannah Stairlifts This is one of the easiest visit reports that I have ever written. Stannah a British, family owned company, is proud to have won the 2003 Best Factory Award and its staff are proud to produce a quality product which gives quality of life to people with mobility problems. Institute members drove through the beautiful Andover countryside to be greeted by our hosts Tim Eagles, Logistics Director and John Vear, Planning Manager. From the off the attitude was welcoming, professional and laced with good humour. We felt at ease immediately. We were asked to nominate our areas of interest so that the presentation after the factory tour could be customised to our needs. We were encouraged to ask any questions and promised honest answers. This is the exact formula to ensure a mutually productive afternoon, and it did! At the end of our three and a half hours exchange of views and experience we were invited to get back to our hosts at any time with any questions that might surface after our visit. At Stannah the factory guides are rotated and our two factory guides were open to every challenge and every question. They included: I select one example for this report from value engineering. It could have been selected easily from at least 20 other different initiatives. This concerns the benefits that can be obtained from working closely with suppliers. The photos below are of three stages of a part that started as a high cost, overengineered, long lead time fabrication (photo 1) to a lower cost, shorter lead time casting (photo 2) to a shorter lead time, lower cost casting fit for purpose with savings on the assembly line (photo 3). Many thanks to the Engineering Director for permission to reproduce this example in Control. This parallels our experience working with suppliers. It seems that all we have to do is to ask suppliers the following question. “How can you help us?” The result is lower costs, shorter lead times, and fit for purpose time and again. It is comforting to learn that Stannah benefit from the same approach. At the end of the afternoon we were looked after in style with drinks and sandwiches during which our members suggested some ways in which Stannah might improve its performance even more. These included taking the co-operation of Stannah and its suppliers even further and value adding mapping prior to the introduction of one piece flow. Tim invited us to get back to him on these suggestions and we encouraged him to contact our experts at the IOM. Such is the relationship between the IOM and Stannah that we were given detailed figures about, for example, sales trends, supplier performance, productivity increase with the same headcount and employee profit sharing. Obviously they are confidential and I will not reveal them in Control. Conclusion: A stimulating and uplifting three and a half-hours. Well worth the time investment and at the end every IOM member that I spoke with said that he had benefited from the visit and was pleased to be invited to suggest how Stannah might improve even further. What a refreshing experience to meet British executives with such an open mind and such a performance track record. We need more visits of this type. Hopefully my report will persuade more of our IOM members to invest three hours in such visits and to suggest other companies that will host a visit and benefit from exchange of views between professionals who face similar challenges in different industries. Well done Tim and John and more power to your elbow/brains. Brian O’Connor BJO’Connor International Ltd Related Topics:
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