Rosti (Scotland)

Written by Alex Morton, (then Quality and Engineering Manager for Rosti).

Background

“Like many other manufacturing industries in the UK and other Western European countries the viability of Rosti's Larkhall facility is under constant threat from low cost manufacturing areas such as China and Eastern Europe. In order to remain competitive and secure the future of the Larkhall site, we require to reduce the proportion of labour content which goes into our products. Rosti's management team had limited experience of Kaizen through our association with Ross International and we decided to carry out a trial Kaizen event to determine if this was a tool which could help us in the future.

We chose to carry out the Kaizen event on the assembly line for a complex mechanical assembly, a product which was experiencing higher than normal customer demand. A series of 'ambitious' goals were set by the management team which were later 'adopted' by the Kaizen Team and it would be fair to say that the ambitious nature of the goals made many people believe they "were just not possible".

Action

A team of 14 people including a guest member from the Scottish Executive was brought together for this exercise including four operators and a number of support people such as internal suppliers and engineers. As team leader it was my role and privilege to co-ordinate the activities and maintain the direction and motivation of the team throughout what turned out to be a long and challenging week.

The week of the Kaizen was the first time any members of the team had been involved in such a close and intense workgroup and it turned out to be an unforgettable experience. The strength and power of such a team being focussed on a single area or problem for a full week is incredible. Put into perspective one of our normal improvement teams with one or two one hours of meetings per week would take well over six months to achieve what we achieved in one week with Ross International.

Results

The results achieved by the team were excellent with us exceeding every goal set for the team. The productivity of the assembly line improved by >67%, reducing work in progress by >83.5%, reducing the space requirements per product by 57% and at the same time increasing the output from the line by 25% with fewer people. Nine agency workers, due to start on the Monday after the Kaizen, were not hired! Five workers on loan from our Hamilton plant were returned on the Wednesday after the Kaizen. All in all, a remarkable improvement in the process.

The involvement of all the groups of people in the process made it easy to gain acceptance of what was a very different manufacturing process. Many of the operators said they had never before been involved in deciding how their processes should be set up and run and were delighted at the opportunity to participate. The overall feeling of the group at the end of the week was one of exhaustion mixed with exhilaration at having achieved so much in so short a space of time. The team has had many meetings since to follow up on the longer-term improvement activities."

Rosti have moved on from this success to carry out several more events (including one in Poland) and are now self-sufficient in running Kaizen Blitz programmes. 30 months later the product (which was the subject of the case study) is still being manufactured in Larkhall (not China) thanks to the efforts of the Kaizen team.