I suppose it was to be expected that our move to two-shift working would throw up some unexpected outcomes. This was the second of the first two weeks of this new arrangement that we introduced in response to the possibility of a Covid shutdown arising from contact tracing. In addition to running two shifts separated in time by 30 minutes we physically separate both shifts from the office staff, including me, who continue to work a day shift. Some also continue to WFH.

The surprise for me has been the difficulty in achieving reliable communication. Not being able to see people and things in the flesh at the “coal face” has been particularly hard for me. The circumstances have also demonstrated to me how far my production managers are from understanding the details of the production processes that they manage. We have seen poor productivity performance, wasted effort in reworking a product that was not made in accordance with verbal instructions, wasted effort in reworking products that were weighed incorrectly due to a failure to follow written and procedural instructions.

Were these leadership failures, communication failures, or fundamental failures of training and operational discipline? Why did they appear under the new management paradigm or were they always there but hidden within the old one? Or is it that stretching the same resources over 16 hours in the midst of holiday season is just begging for trouble? It concerns me and has my attention lest the situation runs out of control.

While challenging the poor performances in the previous 24 hrs it was suggested that our monitoring of the data fails to discriminate between the set-up and clean-down and the production productivity. Which, incidentally, was unfair to one shift over the other. This opens an annoying “can of worms” which follows any attempt to “manage by the numbers” like night follows day.

Firstly the big picture says that the whole enterprise (ie both shifts) is trying to improve the overall productivity (ie units per operator minute) for the  job in question  which was costed on the basis of all the labour required not just the filling labour. Mercedes are concerned with the total points won by Bottas and Hamilton not with the points that one of the drivers would have won if the pitstops hadn’t been included. That is not to say that we shouldn’t present the set-up and clean-down as separate lines on the performance report, each with their own target operator minutes. I have already requested this (how many weeks ago?). We need to be able to focus on these important “pit stop” elements that influence our overall performance and capacity. I have also long requested a weekly plan for maintenance activity, which intersects with the above, incidentally.

What annoys me is that, as usual, we are seeking to manipulate the numbers rather than to use them to drive changes in performance by asking “what and how we can improve” for next time, tomorrow. Where is the effort being made to learn how to do things better?

In the background, we seem to be unusually busy for the time of year with more than one significant production project close to arriving on the shop floor. I need to be confident that the jobs get done right without any further investment of my time in routine operations.

Meanwhile I’m saddened to note that Diana Rigg, a forthright Yorkshire woman and short-lived wife of James Bond, has died. I always get misty eyed when I hear Satchmo’s version of “beautiful World”. At the same time another forthright Yorkshire woman, our daughter, has managed to get to the Seychelles for a Civil Wedding in a romantic setting, which I am very relieved about. Let’s hope that the couple don’t get stuck there quarantined by Covid. Simultaneously Boris is facing criticism from all sides, not least for threatening us all with a “rule of six” Christmas. Perhaps more seriously, he seems to be willing to jettison British probity in international relations in an effort to strengthen his negotiating hand with Michel Barnier. Trust is vital, it must not be thrown away. As a British Subject the value of my word is underpinned by the Prime Minister’s actions so I take it personally that he should deliberately act to make me untrustworthy.

This Brexit issue itself is obviously another massive uncertainty only three months ahead of us. I still have no idea how it will impact on the business. We have a modest amount of sales with customers outside the UK but perhaps more significant will be the supply of materials that originate in the EU even if our suppliers are based in the UK. How do we prepare for that?

I have started to think about looking for new export business and have begun to engage with the outer elements of the DFT to that end. It is a painfully slow and frustrating matter trying to get on the same wavelength with a Civil Servant whose first language is not English and who seems to think that we are qualified to offer an overseas client UK market expertise (in terms of product compliance, registrations, etc) and perhaps warehouse solutions to help them distribute their products in the UK. I understand where she is coming from, but we just mix and pack stuff, we don’t market the stuff that we make, and we have not been very good at it when we have tried. I can only imagine the difficulty of communicating with even an American prospect under those circumstances.

I thought it rather churlish of my son to announce to his mother yesterday that the £3,500 that she had paid for the family holiday at Centre Parcs was, in his opinion, worse value than an alternative that he had in mind at a resort in Mexico. However, this sort of gift-horse dental inspection did lead me to consider the business model that we were all experiencing this week.

As I write this, we are participating in a staycation at one of the six parks that the company operates in the UK and Ireland. Today it is raining. If you want all the facts and figures, the Wikipedia entry is a useful start and then there are the accounts for the year ending April 2019.

The business seems to operate with a £360 millions turnover and generate an operating profit of say £100 millions with a 97% occupancy 365 days per year and about 7,000 employees. The debt seems to be about £1.7 billions and the fixed asset value is £260 millions. The cost of constructing the most recent site in the UK was about £250 millions and each site occupies in the region of 350-400 acres and includes 7-900 lodges of various shapes and sizes. Ours was a six-person unit, each room with an en-suite shower room and a central lounge and kitchen dining area. The lodges are mostly single storey wooden framed structures with flat roofs and good quality interior fittings including TV in every room and central heating. Interestingly there was no washing machine and I found my bed damp which was borne out by the black mould in the shower-room grouting. I couldn’t get a mobile signal anywhere on site but the WIFI was excellent.

Once on site and having unloaded their baggage, guests are required to take their cars to a car park near to the site entrance and thereafter travel within the boundary by foot, bicycle or the company “land train” that continually circuits the site at twenty-five minute intervals. There are central facilities including an enormous swimming pool with slides and things, shops, restaurants and innumerable activities from zip wires to pony rides and pottery painting. Everything a young family could want if their map-reading skills and bicycle riding are up to it.

Our visit was a few weeks after the reopening from lock-down and there were many restrictions in place to ensure social distancing and the safety of one and all. Some facilities were not available and others required pre-booking or the use of i-phone apps and QR codes. It will be interesting to see from the notes to the accounts for year ending April 20, and the following ones, what the financial impact of Covid-19 has been. The efforts to do the right thing seem to have been unstinting.

The staff were all attentive and friendly and seemed to be well treated. The site appeared to be well maintained and given that it occupied a coniferous forest, was manicured just short of the point of not being a wilderness. Occasionally there was wild-life to be seen, apparently much more so during the lock-down.

So what do I think of the experience? Well, for £100 per person per night it was cheaper and less stressful than a London hotel and considerably less unpleasant than flying across the Atlantic. There were many features of the design that I admire and I would very much like to have the opportunity to discuss with the company management how they set about their response to the Covid-19 safety requirements. If I was a shareholder, I would feel proud of the company and pleased to expect continued good returns on my investment. One thing puzzles me though. Why did I feel that the entire enterprise had such a low participation from the BAME community?

More from the sharp end of mixing and packing next week having returned from this unaccustomed break and resumed the role of Godfather rather than Grandfather.

Two weeks since the last blog. The first month of the new year. Grandson’s second birthday and the start of two weeks annual maintenance. Boris decides to get a grip of things before they slide too far and causes much fluttering in the hen-coop.

Business has been steady as we push to complete the orders that are urgent only because we are about to close for two weeks maintenance work. It is amazing how this annual event always seems to panic our customers despite their inability to forecast their requirements at any other time of the year. We also experienced some unfamiliar demand for rework as two jobs were quarantined for problems outside our control but which may nonetheless tarnish our reputation. Interesting learning experiences though, with non-Newtonian behaviour of suspensions and anomalous dissolution rates of dyes in organic acid. Fortunately we have built in some production activity into the maintenance programme.

The two-shift working consultation is progressing steadily too and it looks as though we have cooperation from nearly all. We have identified how we will endeavour to recoup the extra costs of the arrangement by productivity improvements such as running lines through breaks. I’m not certain how sustainable this will be but it may establish changes in practices that will be of long-term benefit. All being well, we will go live at the beginning of September. The Factory Inspector’s visit was chalked up as a success as she decided that it was unnecessary to write us a letter and was complimentary to our safety rep about our provision for Covid-19  security.

We now need to execute our plans for maintenance and the strategic projects for the rest of the year. With Brexit and the uncertainties that surround the pandemic situation, forecasts of 10% unemployment, rises in inflation and the collapse of retail I can only grimace and hope that a focus on training and productivity improvement will be enough.

The sudden quarantining of travellers returning from Spain and Luxembourg as well as the reimposed restrictions on gatherings in Manchester, Bradford and Kirklees on the day before Eid shows a new decisiveness on the part of Government. It also underlines the volatility of the situation everywhere. Our trip to Grandson’s birthday party had two other purposes including a business one but was probably pushing the boundaries for family groups and this is the problem nationally. Too many boundaries are being pushed.

For the “we mix and pack stuff” business it means a continual risk assessment. What actions do we need to take to mitigate the risk of being unable to fulfil a customer’s order due to Covid?

This week revealed last year’s results. We beat budget, we’re profitable (just). We have survived COVID, so far. At the same time, Boris and co. have released the restrictions and people are back in the pubs, going on holiday and thronging to the shops. Social distance is still called for and masks are sort of mandatory where one of the two metres is imaginary.

The trouble with this relaxation of the lock-down is that it means that our people are now no longer protected from exposure and could suddenly catch it from someone at the pub or the supermarket. Then they would have to self-isolate and be tested and everyone that they have worked with would also have to isolate too. Also the safety of everyone is suddenly the responsibility of the business owner and the HSE is ready to pounce.

Both of these issues has occupied much management attention this week. We have two sides of action plan to keep the Factory Inspector happy, including masks for all, and we have begun a consultation over splitting the whole business into two shifts in case one half has to go into isolation.

Another area of concern is a letter from one of our larger customers suggesting that they believe we have been playing fast and loose with their confidential intellectual property. This not the case of course, but their confidence in our integrity has been shaken and sadly it follows from the efforts we have been making to increase our contacts with prospective new customers. The agency we have used appears to have been clumsy in the language describing what we can do for clients.

On the political front Brexit is returning to headlines and Mathew Parris is coruscating in the Times today about Boris being an incompetent mascot rather than the leader that we need. No surprise to me though.

 

This week has seen four examples of a peculiar sort of customer service in which we bring to the customer’s attention a problem that they were’t expecting concerning the product that they had supplied or whose processing they had specified. It is unusual to have four examples in one week’s production and unusual that the responsibility is so clearly not attributable to a failure of ours. Sometimes the reward comes earlier than heaven.

In the first example the customer had supplied a suspension that we were to blend with a mixture of powders before packing into a retail pack. The suspension had separated and we needed to re-suspend the solids and keep them suspended whilst spraying into the powder blend. This work-round was acceptable to the customer but is not a perfect resolution to the problem as the solids were clearly settling so quickly that the last of the liquid, below the level of the stirrer, was separating as we sprayed it. It is also troubling that this phenomenon has not been seen to such an extent before in this product, which might suggest that the formulation was defective in some more significant way. However, the client was pleased that we had been able to keep to our production schedule and we may yet be able to help them to understand the underlying cause.

The second case was one of those parallel import jobs in which we had to  decant someone’s product and then repack it into new bottles labelled with our client’s brand. Our operator decanting the liquid noticed that there was a strange scum floating on the surface of the liquid after decanting which isn’t usually there and which was then found inside the empty decanted bottles. We proposed filtration before filling and after discussion with the client, this is what we did. Technically, nothing should be done to the input material in this parallel product but I argued that we were merely restoring it to its original state before the gum got in there.

The third case was a rush job in which a very significant customer wanted a small amount of pigment to be blended in a couple of IBCs that he sent to us early in the week. He wanted the job to be done immediately and it looked as though we could get both IBCs done in a couple of hours if we short-circuited some of our procedures to get the job up and running. All went well until the operator concerned brought a photo showing that the newly pigmented liquid quickly developed “measles” as soon as the stirring stopped. Clearly the mixture contained a component or an impurity that is not miscible with the pigment. Not such a quick job after-all, as we must now filter the pigmented liquids and return them to their original IBCs after cleaning them of any residual “measles”.

The fourth case was a matter of dissolving a large amount of dye into an acid solution. This had been undertaken previously but with only limited success after difficulties with crystallisation of the dye and the need for return from the client’s customer and then rework. This time a revised process had been agreed to avoid the problem but unfortunately our filtration step showed that a significant proportion of the dye had not been dissolved. Our slow addition had maybe not been slow enough, or maybe we should not have diluted the acid at the stage that we had done it. I doubt that this will  become one of our favourite jobs, even when we get it right.

Ironically these four examples all occurred in the week that we received our largest ever single order and on tracking the circumstances back to the reason for such a big order we can only conclude that it followed from a similar incident. Two years ago we reported to this customer that the material that his supplier had delivered to us for packing was both missing a pigment and was contaminated with rubber bands and stainless machine parts. We fixed both of these things and the gods smiled on us!

Next week we will gently try to recover some of the extra costs that these incidents have incurred. We will also expand our daily briefings into the area of Covid-19 masks now that Boris has become an enthusiast and the idiot Trump has found it expedient to wear one.

So the champions let down the good Mr Klopp. How will he respond? How will the mixandpack operation respond to next week’s results for the last year’s efforts? Where are we going?

I have set some targets for the business. They depend on finding new business and on improving the productivity performance across the business, old and new. They are not outstandingly difficult targets: 10% sales and 15% productivity growth, but they are challenging for a business that seems to struggle to learn from its mistakes.

This year I want us to make some significant progress in five areas: the development of our supervisory cadre so that they can help their teams to achieve more, an unrelenting focus on productivity improvement, a modest but real expansion of capacity, a sustained effort to extend and expand our digital marketing and an expanded and reinforced IT system to provide timely and accurate management information to the production staff.

Each of the five areas needs time and resources to progress but possibly the most difficult is the first because it needs the participants to engage wholeheartedly in the process. It is also possibly the most important of the five because it is potentially an amplifier of everyone’s efforts.

The thing about learning is that it is iterative so you learn a bit more every time that you do it. Training, on the other hand, is about doing it right every time. The two come together when the definition of “right” needs to change in the face of experience. It is all part of “growing up”, climbing the “learning curve” and building a team.

Success or failure in these vial endeavours also depends on recognition of the importance of people and truth in the mixture of the learning process.

Bringing someone new into the team is never straight-forward as both old and new members have personal histories and perspectives that influence their response to the new configuration. Rumour and gossip can colour the perception of truth by all parties with potentially permanent consequences for the individuals and team cohesion.

This is currently very evident politically, as Boris struggles to keep his team together amidst public criticism of individual ministers and advisers arising from their actions and ascribed motives during a national and and international crisis compounded with another born of deep-rooted and historic crimes. I think that Boris has lost the public’s confidence and in turn they have chosen to act selfishly and self-indulgently.

Back at the mixandpackstuff operation we have once again entered the time of year that is characterised by lower demand, an opportunity to train, to clean and to maintain with the loss of incentive to improve productivity. Individuals focus on their personal issues and draw on gossip and rumour to shape their response to the collective task. Maybe the start of a new financial year and a new set of objectives will be an opportune moment to do what Boris has failed to do. Pick up the team like the good Mr Klopp.

Today was supposed to be a very big deal. At last our daughter was to be married and everyone agreed that it was about time. It was never going to be a simple matter, working in the middle-east and all, and the venue for 130 guests was to be in Majorca. But then came Covid-19 and a twelve month postponement commenced. The bride’s mother took it very stoically, the dressmaker slowed to a crawl and the happy couple worked on their tans midst the lock-down. How will the world have changed in a year?

Making predictions of this sort has never been a strength of mine and with a 20% fall in GDP last month it seems easier to simply hope for survival. Obviously we all need to do more than hope. We need to reassess our situation and move forward with innovation and creativity in our hearts as we strive to accentuate the positive and learn from the experience. This may sound trite but would it sound any better if I simply said “we’re all doomed”?

I think that the bride and groom will still be there next year but they may not still work in the middle-east. I think that the bride’s mother will still be stoical but possibly a little less stressed about day to day isolation and I think that the mixandpackstuff operation will be surviving and still learning to be a little better every day. I’d like to think that we will all be a little less inconsiderate of one another and a little more considerate of our environment. But I’m not sure that I can see the basis of this in fact yet and then there is Brexit!

On the political front, the key indicator is whether Boris is seen for what he is and which way the mood swings in response. In November, a similar decision will be made in the US but will there be wisdom and humility to follow? For the mixandpackstuff business I can see that our investments in operations management tools are capable of bearing fruit provided that we develop the nous to use the information effectively and promptly. So I am proceeding cautiously but confidently. The father of the bride will have a good story to tell!

 

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.

What went well yesterday? I ask at the start of every morning’s briefing. Sometimes I get an answer and when I do it is always a pleasure to think that someone is proud of their contribution to the completion of a job even if I don’t always agree that the job has gone well. This weekend I look back at some of the photos from the preceding days and I feel pride that they illustrate production that was finally concluded, or finished for the first time, and therefore milestones in our growth, but also frustration at the underlying shortcomings.

Whilst the completed jobs mean that we are still on track to achieve our sales and profit budget, which in these pandemic days is no mean feat, the underlying service and quality issues are a huge concern. Why are we still making the same mistakes? Why do we seem to be incapable of learning?

I refer to the quality issues raised in last week’s blog and to a customer’s rejection of one of the batches of a powder blend that represented a significant new product volume with serious future tonnage. We fixed this problem quickly and today the whole lot is waiting for despatch. Only a week late but hardly an inspirational experience from the customer’s point of view. Furthermore, our investigation to date has not explained why the defect occurred, only that a number of procedural shortcomings and unrecorded processing steps leave doubts about the fundamental competence of the people concerned, undermining trust at all levels. Whereas I can and will use the opportunity of apologising to our customer to accentuate the positives, we have gained analytical and processing experience with this formulation after all, I can’t admit that our people have still not learned to follow our fundamental weighing procedures properly.

In a similar example, relating to the leak testing of the induction heat sealed bottles highlighted last week, I find that the operator concerned this week appeared to be happy to discard 5% of the bottles that he regarded as damaged but did not consider bringing this and the lot number of the items to management attention in order to stimulate some remedial action!

Do we employ fish? Or is our training so ambiguous or ephemeral that the generic nature of this issue and the importance of reporting all details of defective supplies is unrecognised? Or is the explanation linked to the motivation of people? Do they consider that their job is limited to filling or cartoning the bottles and that the additional tasks of sealing, checking the seal and stimulating corrective action in the event of failure to be someone else’s problem? Perhaps the review of line performance on the day in question is not something that they are involved in or engaged with? “Best to keep stumm and dodge the bullet”.

If we can’t learn to review what we  have done so as to avoid making the same mistakes next time we are doomed!

Perhaps Boris’s advisors will learn, after a period of review, that if everyone hates you it is wise not not to give them cause to get you sacked. Otherwise known as the adage “people who live in glass houses should not throw stones”.