I feel that we made some incremental progress this week. The Covid-19 situation eased a little: we continue to “be alert”, the Government appears to be in shambles but schools are starting to re-open and the death rate is down. Some of our staff appear to be getting the idea that we need: self-discipline, pro-activity and vigilance. Production rates are up and jobs are getting ticked off the list. The sun has shone and rain has freshened the crops.

Only the wider world seems to be determined that things aren’t bad enough that we also need to gather in groups to protest the unbelievable stupidity, or should I say venality, of some US policemen and their President while Boris is driving us to a “no deal” Brexit.

Our strategy is simple. We will try to do the things that we know we need to do a bit better every time than we did before.

Our Marketing strategy is based on reinforcing the foundations of our on-line presence and cautiously exploring our market with telesales research and contact making. Both of these strands are showing enough results to give confidence in their value.

Our Manufacturing strategy is to utilise the shop-floor data capture to give ever more rapid response to the questions “what went wrong? and what did we do to fix it?” with a focus on productivity and learning from every job. I think the numbers will tell us that there is improvement but that it is very slow.

Our Production Management strategy revolves around building the confidence of the individuals concerned through delegation, external management training and a boatload of one on one coaching and encouragement. This extends to the apprentices who now have an additional engineering staff member to work with and learn from. The results are small but visible and we have a Company song sung daily to remind us to keep alert!

Some specific improvements concern: the sieving operation which is now in spec with improving productivity, the hot glue bag sealing job that has now finished with an excellent productivity improvement, the liquid filling line that has reduced the bottle sealing failures and which should have a completely new labeller belt by Tuesday. Maybe something to blog about next week.

I suppose one specific job that might teach us most of all, in the long term, concerns the blending and packing of one tonne of a four component powder formulation that I took at a low price because I could not really believe that we are so un-competitive as to lose that job. It is supposed to be what we do, after all. So I focused on all aspects of the job: from the 2 hours that I spent in drafting the production documents to the 2 hours that were spent on the COSHH assessment, the production set-up, the blending, the packing of the 100 x 10kg buckets, the clean down of both blending and packing equipment and the finalisation of the paperwork. The report next week will tell the sorry story and ask the question: how could we do it better?

The next two weeks promise to be very busy ones! Then we will have just 10 days left to the year end.