A critical issue our company faced in the past is Time and Personnel Management on remanufacturing sites.
As an engineering and defence company, one of our main sources of revenue is remanufacturing and refurbishment of unserviceable armoured personnel carriers or gun boats for military applications.
On projects when remanufacturing and refurbishment is carried out at our factory, we hardly have time or personnel management difficulties. However, we were having problems of time and personnel management with on-site jobs which increased our total operating costs.
Our company needed to cut down time and personnel needed for on-site jobs. This had been our operation for a while and we needed to come up with a plan to cut down expenses.
This problem identified in our engineering operation process stemmed from our policy of taking our qualified engineers and transportation of all required tools and equipment to the job site. While this may be profitable on jobs with longer delivery times, it was cost intensive on shorter projects.
After series of meetings, we arrived at the following possibilities:
- Outsource certain parts of our remanufacturing / refurbishment to companies in our job location.
- Hire required man power / labour locally.
- Apply for jobs that are not on-site (taking the vehicle to our factory)
- Identify tools / equipment that can be rented from job site.
- Do not apply for short delivery time jobs
Due to our objective being to cut down on on-site remanufacturing operating costs, our criteria identified was financial. All possibilities were evaluated and a decision to implement 1, 2, and 4 was approved.
An action plan which is a document that lists what steps must be taken in order to achieve a specific goal had to be discussed. The purpose of this action plan was to clarify what resources are required to reach the goal, formulate a timeline for when specific tasks need to be completed and determine what resources are required.
Our action plan was tailored to attain local market access at each job location.
During our job assessment phase, we simultaneously researched for local companies that had equipment / tools necessary for remanufacturing, local labour / man-power and identified companies that we could outsource some parts of the remanufacturing to e.g. welding / upholstery.
We also were able to save costs on transportation of tools / equipment, accommodation and feeding of engineers that were not necessary for short time delivery jobs.
While we faced the risks of using substandard artisans for outsourcing, we were able to mitigate this by delegating the head of each department to supervise any company our job as been outsourced to. e.g. all welding jobs outsourced were supervised and commissioned by our head welder at the job location.
A systematic process is often closely associated with critical thinking. In general, the application of a systematic process is regarded as a means of management aimed at reducing the number and severity of mistakes, errors and failures due to either human or technological functions involved.
These decisions made saved costs for our company and shareholders.
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References:
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