An interview with Mr. Dave Rantor the Production director, was held before the new SAPI system went live. In it he explains what his expectations about the impact of the system are.
My idea in putting SAPI in our system is that SAPI was going to ensure that we only manufactured that which we needed, it was going to reduce our inventory, it’s got potential for planning our materials right the way through the whole of the manufacturing process. It was also going to enable to bring in more business without having to go the corporation and ask for more capital. So it seeemed to fulfill a number of problems that we were grappling with. I guess the other area that caused us a lot of concern was that, over the years, different departments were working with the different pieces of data. It was becoming increasingly apparent that much of the time was being spent in trying to defend the different pieces of data against all the other data that was around. There was no common database from which the company operated. There was a lot of different information , and all that did that was to confuse people because, depending upon who you asked, you got different answer. It was also leading to much unnecessary work here just trying to figure out which numbers were correct, if any of them was correct, and what basis of those numbers was. We saw an enormous advantage if we could bring in one common database across the company that was available to everyone and was being constantly updated, So once again SAPI was an obvious way of tackling that problem . So, that’s where we started from. We started by saying these the problems we’ve got and SAPi appeared to be a solution to these problems. Then we began to see a number of other benefits that were going to come from having SAPI, that was to do with changing our culture, for want of a better expression. Our feeling was that responsibility was not being taken at the appropriate level in the organization. There was a need to force responsibility and accountability down the management line to the place where the accountability should rest, it varied throughout the organization but in general we felt the accountability was one or maybe two layers above where it ought to be. We saw that SAPI was going to help us because everyone was going to be part of the same system.
It is also my concern that we’ve spent a lot of time in reporting performance. In the past it’s been expected that npeople in the plant have to report on various aspects of plant performance at regular intervals. It’s been a lot of pain in getting all the information together and putting it into the right form for it to be meaningful. Often when it’s meaningful it’s also been historic so really it’s not been all that valuabe, it’s been meaningful it’s also been what happened but it’s not much use in telling you what you’re going to happen and how to avoid problems in the future. That whole reporting system will change because the information is going to be readily accessable and you can pull it out of the system in whatever form you want as long as you decide what that form is in advance. Better than that, you’re not going to have to wait until the end of the month, or whatever period it is you normally write your report in, but you can have the machine monitoring certain things for you. So you can be looking at trends and you can get warnings of impending horror stories. You can do something about it beforehand – you’re going to be spending your time on preventative things rather than curative things, I see that this is going to free an enormous amount of time nad the result of that is we don’t need as many people to do the same things as we’ve been doing in the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment