How to carry out lean production for employees in iron-making enterprises?

The difficulty in recruiting workers and the high turnover rate of employees are becoming more and more headaches for society and enterprises. At the same time, lean production is booming in various industries in China, and more and more enterprises realize the importance and urgency of reducing inventory, shortening cycle and reducing cost through implementing lean production. However, while implementing lean production and enjoying the benefits brought by lean production, Chinese enterprises are often faced with the dilemma of how to apply lean production in the case of high employee turnover rate.

From the origin and development of lean production, all the ideas and methods of lean production are basically based on the relative stability of employees. Neither Japan nor the United States, where lean production is widely used, has really faced the outstanding problem of high employee turnover rate in China. It can be said that this is a problem with China characteristics. Therefore, when China enterprises began to apply lean production, they soon found that the high turnover rate of employees had a great impact on the effect of lean production, which was mainly reflected in:

1, affecting line balance.

Lean production requires that every station of the production line should be balanced according to the beat, and the loss of employees will inevitably affect the balance of the whole production line.

2. The transfer process is inefficient.

Prenatal preparation is an important work in lean production, and whether prenatal training is done well is the biggest key to affect the production line. Employees are often well-trained, but they suddenly leave as soon as they go online, which leads to the abnormality of the whole production arrangement and affects the final mass production.

3. Training difficulties

Lean production lines often have higher theoretical and technical requirements for employees, and enterprises should invest more resources in training new employees, especially in labor-intensive enterprises, which is even more arduous. What's more, when employees are familiar with lean concepts, methods and management, they leave the enterprise quickly, which makes many lean promoters feel tired and even lose patience, which is one of the reasons why many enterprises give up lean production.

4, affect the lean enterprise culture

Frequent employee turnover and replenishment, lack of sense of belonging and participation in the enterprise, can not be well integrated into the strategy and system of lean enterprises, and it is difficult to establish and continue lean culture and improve the atmosphere. Many enterprises just pose a "U" shape with the passage of time, which is not real lean production.

All these influences make the promoters of lean production have to spend more time to solve how lean production adapts to the high turnover rate of employees. So how can we promote lean production more effectively in this situation?

1, change the concept of labor force

In China, labor is no longer a resource that can be squandered at will. The labor force has changed from a buyer's market where factories choose people to a seller's market where workers choose enterprises. Enterprises should fundamentally change the concept of employing people, regard employees as the most important resources of enterprises, regard labor as a long-term fixed cost more important than machines, and maximize the output of human resources! As an enterprise, it is necessary to change from extensive management concepts and methods in the past to lean management centered on employees, change short-term employment thinking, and fundamentally change the concept of labor force from management concepts, methods, incentives, environment, opportunities and welfare.

2, fully mobilize the participation and creativity of employees.

The core of lean management is to pay attention to employees' participation in the field, fully mobilize the initiative and enthusiasm of employees to find and solve problems, guide and encourage employees to participate in continuous improvement, give play to their creativity, and enhance their sense of ownership through their active participation. In traditional employee management, employees are often excluded from participating in improvement, and can only passively implement improvement results or operate according to standard documents, which affects the overall promotion and in-depth development of lean production.

3. Strengthen lean concepts and methods.

Many enterprises simply think that reducing the turnover rate means increasing wages. In fact, in recent years, the salary difference between enterprises and regions is not obvious, and the turnover rate of employees due to low salary is not as high as people think. If the salary level of the company is not much different from that of the surrounding factories, employee turnover is likely to be related to the company culture, career development channels planned for employees, company management level, incentive mechanism, humanistic care, target management, long-term enjoyment and other factors. According to my years of management experience, I mainly focus on humanized management, incentive mechanism, transaction participation, team spirit and so on related to lean concepts and methods.

Therefore, before implementing lean production, managers and all employees involved must be trained in the concept of lean production, so that everyone can understand the purpose, advantages and difficulties of improvement. You must never do it in ignorance. Of course, you can't expect a training to solve the problem. You should continue training and publicize lean production from all aspects. Of course, the most important thing is executives and other managers. If they don't know, understand and support, it's useless for employees to do it.

4. Improve standardized operation

Since employee turnover is inevitable, we should find ways to reduce the time for employees to study and train after leaving. How to make new employees familiar with their jobs as soon as possible after leaving their jobs? One of the key points is to strengthen the standardization of operation:

On the one hand, all operations must be standardized and documented, and the standardized elements should include all information related to the station, such as operation steps, operation time, beat, standard work in process, operation skills, precautions, quality requirements and so on. The more perfect the standard operation and standard documents, the faster the new employees will learn. Imagine that if these elements are only in employees' brains, once they are lost, subsequent employees will not be able to obtain these information, or it will take longer to master these requirements.

On the other hand, the requirements of standardization must be clear, and the information should be easy to understand, so as to ensure that any new employee can easily understand the requirements and standards of related elements through standardized work instructions. Through standardized operation, new employees can master the operation of the work as quickly as possible and reduce losses. Colleagues who make work instructions must be equipped with operation videos to facilitate employees to master the operation methods.

5. Optimize the process and reduce dependence on people.

Simplify and optimize the existing process, and reduce the skill requirements and dependence of process operation on people through automation or automation measures. Simplify the existing processes, minimize interruptions, backflow, crossover, enjoyment and other processes, and make the processing process clear. Strive for perfection, and at the same time, appropriately adopt some small and cheap automation equipment or tools to replace labor, so as to reduce the operational complexity of employees (but avoid excessive pursuit of expensive, huge and complicated equipment). For error-prone links, visual error prevention measures should be adopted as far as possible to prevent and reduce employees' unconscious mistakes and reduce the requirements of process operation. By optimizing the process, increasing the stability and reliability of the process and reducing the requirement and dependence on people's skills, enterprises can cope with the risk of frequent replacement of new employees in the case of high employee turnover and ensure quality and efficiency.

Step 6 Cultivate generalists

Cultivate all-round workers, all-round workers, so that one person can operate multiple devices or multiple workstations (at least three workstations for each person). When some workstations lose employees, these versatile workers can be used to quickly fill vacancies and increase the flexibility of production arrangements. Facing the reality of high employee turnover rate, enterprises must implement multi-functional training and reserve in a planned way. The more multifunctional workers in the factory, the greater the coverage, and the greater the flexibility of the factory to adapt to the increase or decrease of employees. At the same time, enterprises should also establish corresponding multi-functional incentive mechanisms to stimulate employees' multi-functional needs and motives.

7, flexible arrangement of production

Traditional mass production lines are used to designing large and long high-capacity production lines through quota system. The whole production line has a large capacity and many people, and each worker is only responsible for a simple operation step in the process. This large and long production line often needs to mix and produce a variety of products, and the products are frequently switched. If a worker is lost, this post will become a bottleneck restricting the efficiency of the whole production line. Lean production mode can change the traditional large and long high-yield production line into a small and short unit production line, which can be flexibly arranged.

8. Solve the bottleneck of the production line after employees leave.

After lean production is balanced according to the beat, once there is employee turnover in the production line, if new employees are added, it will inevitably produce bottlenecks in the employee-losing stations and even affect the overall efficiency of the production line. How to make up for this bottleneck loss as soon as possible? There are several ways to try:

● Use a well-trained generalist or generalist to supplement the loss.

● Establish a "motorized production line". The concept of "mobile production line" is to establish an identical spare production line according to the normal standard production line to serve several normal production lines. When employee turnover occurs in the normal production line, employees with equivalent proficiency should be added to the normal production line from the "mobile production line" to ensure that the overall balance and production efficiency of the normal production line are not affected by employee turnover, and new employees should be added to the "mobile production line". The imbalance of "mobile production line" can be solved by inventory buffering or flexible working hours. Lean hegemony

● Temporary auxiliary personnel are added to bottleneck stations to meet the overall line balance.

9, strengthen the construction of the team leader

As a grass-roots manager who directly deals with employees in the production line, the team leader is the most important part of managing employee turnover, and his ability and management style are the most critical factors to realize effective management of employee turnover.

Training, teaching and encouraging the role of team leaders are the most easily overlooked links in most clothing and luggage enterprises. Enterprise managers are used to focusing their training and management on middle and senior managers, supervisors and engineers, leaving the management and teaching of team leaders to the production department. Therefore, team leadership is the most important but also the weakest link in all management! We know that the production line is the most important place in the whole company, and it is the place that really creates value for customers. Other functions are auxiliary, and on-site management depends entirely on the team leader.

10, combined with lean project improvement ideas

Lean ideas and methods are applied to the production management system and integrated into HR- HR employee management behavior, so as to improve the project practice of employee turnover, and effectively integrate the original scattered ideas and methods such as lean production, site management, quality technology and HR personnel administration into a systematic routine and management behavior, thus presenting an effective project improvement model for lean practitioners and enterprise managers.

Although the staff turnover rate is a social problem faced by China, lean production is not the only way to solve the staff turnover, but simply implementing lean production is obviously not enough to effectively realize the comprehensive benefits that lean production can bring, and may even lead to abandonment or failure (I understand that there are many such cases, and those who are confident to implement them will end in failure). Only by combining the concept and method of lean production with the actual situation faced by Chinese enterprises can we find the concept and method suitable for China's national conditions.