Innovation Corner
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Please contact the MRC if your company has an innovation that it would be willing to share with local manufacturers. We can assist with writing the article.
Eastern Ontario Manufacturing
A Focus on Productivity and Innovation
Final Report 2011 |
This new initiative established Manufacturing Productivity, Innovation & Assessment Action Teams known colloquially as “Manufacturing Jump Teams”. In February and March 2011, the teams traveled across a pilot region in Eastern Ontario, assessing and making recommendations to twelve manufacturing companies with the objective of supporting their efforts to increase productivity, upgrade facilities, expand opportunities and look towards new and innovative practices to sustain and ideally grow their business and market share.
The final report, generated as a result of this project, includes:
• The project background, partners, objective, description, anticipated outcomes and participating companies,
• The Productivity Assessment Tool and the Employee Engagement Tool,
• “Common Themes for Improvement” relating to the assessment process, productivity and employee engagement,
• Support programs and resources available to companies
• Recommendations for industrial support, communication of results, partnerships and funding.
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| Training Simulations: Real-world experience without real world risks |
An age-old training question is how to provide real-world experience without the real-world risks of letting a novice take the reins too soon.
Apprenticeships and job shadowing may help, but now technology can provide some very useful tools in the form of simulations. Simulations train pilots, soldiers, and doctors, where learning is vital and mistakes can cost lives. Mistakes during simulations aren’t costly, they are valuable because they result in learning experiences with no harm done.
We are seeing a dramatic increase in the use of educational simulations because they are a great fit for hands-on learning for older learners and the tech-savvy learners of today. Simulations inject realism and interactivity into a program and enhance the outcomes while accelerating the learning process. LTDC uses simulations in our new Business Acumen Program and our 3 A’s of Leadership and Authority.
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| Lean Applies to Job Shops, Too. |
Most managers understand Lean manufacturing as a production practice to increase value and reduce waste. Value is what customers are willing to pay for and waste is any activity that doesn’t increase value. So Lean is centered around creating more value with less work.
What most managers don’t understand is where Lean can be applied. The stereotype is that Lean is only useful in high volume, mass production manufacturing that uses standardized, repetitive processes. Bob Forder at Deloro-Stellite has punctured this misconception by successfully applying Lean manufacturing to their job shop. For example, Bob and his team walked the production route with a wheel and were astonished to learn that their annual product movement was 2018 km and their employee movement was 3115 km, that’s from Belleville to Saskatoon.
Now, when you imagine how long it takes employees to push a product rack from Belleville to Saskatoon, and how much you are paying them to do so, Bob’s Lean initiative makes a lot of sense even in a job shop. At Deloro-Stellite, they eliminated 73% of the production movement and 82% of the employee movement.
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