Lets start with some interesting facts regarding Trane’s Colchester factory (just to bring you up to speed).
The plant started-out in the late ’80s as a sub-contractor before being forced into bankruptcy & being taken-over by Trane directly. This is is all part of the great history of one small factory in the middle of Earls Colne airfield. Over the last 10 years, 798 people have been employees of the company. Take-out 15 wholeft due to retirement, and 28 who got laid-off when the nightshift was closed-down, and you have a hell of a staff turn-over, especially when you consider that at any one time there are only 80 people employed on site.
We have had 1 profitable year in the last 25. Our bosses in France funded the 3-month employment of one person to look in to where the problems lay, his report was damning, it concluded that over 78% of all mistakes came out of the office. Luckily this report never quite made it to France, and the factory manager managed to convince his French superiors that almost all the problems were caused by the shop-floor workers. Each year, the poor sods get shat-on with crap pay revues (ALWAYS set 0.6% below inflation), whilst us office workers get inflation-busting pay rises.
The biggest joke of all, giving Malcolm Kniell a promotion to cell leader, personally, I wouldn’t put the ignorant tosser in charge of running a bath. Still, it gives the lackys something to moan about. Having seen some of the great un-washed, I can see why MW breezes through the plant, avoiding any un-necessary contact with the scum. I think it’s quite amusing that he can’t remember many of their names.
Now we have bought-in to the idea of ‘lean manufacturing’, this involves using meetings called ‘kaisans’ to solve all the problems we have in a last-ditch attempt to become efficient before Ingersoll Rand’s take-over, thus saving our arses from being booted-out the door. The crazy thing is, a kaisan can be called by anyone at any time, if the guys on the shop floor twig this, then they could start calling kaisans left, right and centre. That would really screw-up production levels. Add to this, 5-s & 6 sigma, and we are really confusing the poor sods.
We’ve had them painting boxes round bins, re-laying their work cells (only to relocate them a few weeks later), and the best one of all, removing all the gangway markings with a hanner, then getting them to put down miles of masking tape & re-painting the lines again (well, it was too cold to send them outside to prune the bushes with a pair of tin-snips)
