Innovation
Issue No. 47 - June/ july
Lean opportunity for Futuris
Manufacturing is no bed of roses nowadays, particularly when one has the odd experience of making car parts hand over fist one moment, then finding one’s whole enterprise threatened as car sales collapse the next.
Quality Manager for the Futuris Automotive South Australia,, Neil Cordon says while roller-coaster has been a rough ride for the auto parts maker, a big benefit has been suddenly getting everyone on the same page.
Neil is a proponent of Lean Enterprise principles, which eliminate waste in work processes to achieve productivity, cost and environmental gains. Before the global financial crisis hit, implementing Lean was a strong focus and fast becoming aligned across the whole of the South Australian management group, the GFC was the event that allowed us to take a few risks and align the way we ran our business toward the concept of a process based structure changing a few old paradigms and breaking tradition in many areas.
“We had begun our approach to this around three years before the global downturn,” Neil says. “The primary objective was to achieve and sustain a competitive edge in our operations.
“We spent two years consolidating sites and acquiring strategic businesses; merging them into what Futuris is today. There was always a ‘big project’ to focus on.
“Once this was all done, we realized our starting points of applying tools such as Kaizen teams and 5S were only capable of relatively short-term gain. We had reached a tipping point where the wider concepts of Lean would lose emphasis without something more to encourage the journey whilst in search of a more stable and sustainable foundation.
“Then the global landscape changed; Holden had been on th everge of becoming the designer, manufacturer and exporter of the new global rear-wheel-drive platform, with Futuris designing and supplying seating and interior systems for this enterprise. The Futuris edge was based on design innovation and manu...
