select... Topics Organization People Activities Issues

Vol 30 - No 07 - November 2004 Step Change Improvement at Stannah Stannah Stairlifts Limited is a family-owned business, employing 600 people. It is based in Andover, Hampshire, where it has manufacturing and distribution operations and further manufacturing is located in Blaydon, Tyne and Wear. The company produces two types of stairlift – one for straight staircases and one for curved. The situation is slightly complicated by the range of options each product must feature (colour, variants of seatbelt, control systems to name a few) – there are over 440,000 valid variants of each product! Manufacturing is deliberately a mix of lean and agile operations because of this. Each stairlift order must be custom configured, but major sub-assemblies (chair, carriage, installation kits) are identical and built-to-stock. Stannah has invested heavily in production facilities, with metal fabrication (laser cutting, bending, welding), powder coating, final assembly and distribution operations all in-house. Page number: 16 Word count: 3000 Related Topics: Change management
	To read the articles you'll need Acrobat Reader. To download Acrobat Reader click the following button: To Save and Print the articles click the appropriate on-screen buttons or select Save or Print from the File menu at the top of the Acrobat window.