The Art of the Possible
By Karl Douglas,
General Manager - Smith & Nephew Extruded Film

Discontent with our ways of working in the factory, in both management and staff, had been building for a long time. Staff were being asked to work overtime at short notice, the plan was changing frequently as sales orders were pulled forward to cover late production elsewhere and waste was high. Training and development had long been forgotten. Along side this we were losing people to local factories who offered higher fixed pay for higher hours. Management were spending a huge proportion of their time re-organising shift rotas as the plan changed and persuading people to work different hours. As people were not getting trained above the basics flexibility was actually decreasing. Senior management were constantly frustrated at the unreliability of the factory and the huge costs associated with the overtime.

The daft thing was, we were getting everything done by the end of each month - it was just painful! As the then Supply Chain Manager, I was in the middle of all this; the factory was fed up with the push, senior management were fed up with the cost and the rest of the business was fed up with the missed promises. Other than that, everything was fine!

One cold and wet October morning in the middle of our period end push, I received a flyer, from Pasfield Curran, that read something like "improve results, service and reduce costs with a better work-life balance", which normally would have gone straight in the bin - but not today. I decided to attend the seminar and see what these people had to say. There was a level of honesty and reality in the presentations that intrigued me - all of them were saying this was not the panacea, it would be hard work and there was no one size fits all solution. I agreed to a follow up…

Here we are, six months after the implementation and what we are achieving is almost unbelievable. One thing I can certainly say is that the implementation process was hard work. I thought the toughest people to convince would be the factory workers but actually the factory management and the senior management were just as tough! At times during the process it was difficult but gradually people started to buy in, notably Sarah Baslington our HR Manager, and together we cracked on and spent a lot of time with groups and individuals listening to their concerns and trying to overcome them. We eventually went to a vote and achieved 76% in favour.

I am writing this after 25 weeks of the new ways of working and we have hit plan 24 out of those. We only missed the 25th because of a major breakdown, which meant we could not catch back in the week but we did in the next week – no customer despatch dates were missed because of this. Waste has been reduced by 100%, as we are now hitting the overall cost standards. Operating efficiencies are up by c10% across the board. Since introducing flexible annualised hours our factory employees have had most Fridays off. We have seen our natural collaborative approach between staff and management flourish. We have already improved the scheme for employees and seen our results improve still further. We have killed the period end push and we have had zero staff turnover. The rest of the business has noted a major difference too in reliability and increased flexibility to include trial and sample production to generate additional business. I would seriously hope now that if we were to vote on keeping the scheme or going back to our old ways, it would be virtually 100% to keep it. And management are totally committed to this less stressful way of working too.