Industrial Productivity Training Manual

Written By: Michael Muller, David Briggs, Don Kasten, Kevin Commer, Jenifer Mak, Michael Simek, Chris Tierney, Gustavo Garcia

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Background

As part of the Climatewise program, Professor Muller and other technical staff of the OIPEA have been involved with adding an energy and waste component to the PICOS supplier development program run by General Motors. As part of these activities, the GM people observed an IAC style assessment in New Jersey. Professor Muller then spent a week in Charlotte observing a PICOS assessment. During this information exchange it became clear that IAC assessments could be more effective if additional efforts were put into direct productivity issues. Recognizing that we have had training courses for center directors on energy and waste, it was concluded that an additional course should be assembled on productivity.

Evaluation of the GM PICOS Assessment Program

The PICOS program is a long running industrial assessment service provided by GM for their suppliers based carefully on the Toyota Production System. The goal of the program is to improve the productivity of suppliers and pass the savings on to GM, which has a policy of continually paying less for a product each year. They are proud that they never tolerate price increases.

The workshops, as they are called, use a team of normally two Supplier Development Engineers who are in the plant for 3.5 days. These are people with a variety of backgrounds and for the most part are not engineers. They make some suggestions themselves, but rely mostly on working groups of plant personnel to come up with cost saving ideas. Implementation of good ideas is expected to be immediate. Layout changes, for example, are often accomplished while the PICOS team is still there.

Until recently, staff in the PICOS program did not concern themselves with waste or energy, but focused entirely on productivity issues. We can learn a great deal from the general approaches they use, but proprietary concerns will prohibit us from adopting any of their practices directly.

Goals and Extent of the Training Program

We hope to provide some background material, but concentrate on a number of worked examples of various kinds of productivity recommendations. The goal of the training is to provide directors with several tools which they can apply directly.

Additionally, by showing the large impact of some of these recommendations, it is hoped that director's themselves will be motivated to develop their own novel tools and fixes.