Success through innovation: How BMW have been able to double production capacity
- Richard Chetty An immense amount of initial effort was placed on designing the workers’
shift patterns. A high level of innovation was required in this part of the planning process to ensure that we could derive the absolute maximum production from the current facility. The team came up with great solutions which included recommendations from various work groups.
T
his is a South African story of success through innovation. It shows how process optimisation
and an improvement in productivity can be successfully negotiated by ensuring a strong focus on creative and innovative thinking. At the core of “competitive advantage” is innovation and strategy. The more innovative an organisation is, the more competitive they become. This was certainly the case in my recent
role at B.M.W. South Africa, where I was responsible for Innovation and Strategy. Since the end of 2010, most of my energy has been focussed on how to create innovative solutions for increased manufacturing volumes. A core team of senior people were selected to support my greatly demanding task. The objective was that the production of vehicles at our manufacturing plant in Rosslyn be doubled from 50 000 units to 100 000 units per year. This needed to be achieved without any major financial investment, making use of the same production line but ‘sweating our assets.’ We initially looked at the scope of work that other industries had to undertake to achieve similar success. I spent some time internationally at other manufacturing facilities to understand what some of the considerations would be. As the team dug deeper, we realised that the scope of the task was far greater than we had originally anticipated.
22 Management Today | April 2012
An immense amount of initial effort was placed on designing the workers’ shift patterns. A high level of innovation was required in this part of the planning process to ensure that we could derive the absolute maximum production from the current facility. The team came up with great solutions which included recommendations from various work groups.
Involvement = Commitment. This was evident in the results of including all levels of the workforce in the design phase of this part of the project. A direct result of employee involvement was that they were encouraged to become more creative in their processes, thus ensuring the highest possible production volume. Another result came from the high focus on how to eliminate waste, improve quality and improve ergonomics. All of these factors represented benefits that added to the increase in volume in the current scenario.
The most important step was to ensure that the current processes of manufacturing was optimised first, before attempting to design additional time into the process. There was a fear at that point that by just adding additional shifts, the impact from current inefficiencies could be exacerbated and carried over into the additional shifts.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103