A Focus on the People

The latter part of this week was interesting at work. In the matter of a few hours, a new vision started to develop for our employee training.

I'm still kind of recovering from the shock and my own excitement.

Next week, we are going to start getting out new training materials to our employees. But this is not going to be like the past. Sure, we will still have the work instructions and the process guides. However, these alone just don't meet the needs of the ever-increasing competitiveness of manufacturing. We are going to focus on developing our employees to be active contributors to the organization - not people who are waiting around to be told what to do.

The first segment is going to be on drawing and bunching dies. However, this is not just going to be talking about dies. We are going to have microscopes set up with dies having varying degrees of wear. Associates will actually have the chance to inspect dies. My hope - my dream - is that more and more people will begin to take ownership of their production. Why? Because this is the way it has to be. The manufacturing environment of years past is dead and gone. In fact, some people have said that manufacturing is dying off completely. Maybe we just need to start re-thinking manufacturing.