Work starts – La Hilandería

Work starts – La Hilandería So finally I’ve managed to get my hands a bit dirty here, especially regarding the PhD. In Salinas there’s a yarn factory that produces yarn from sheep and alpacas. Organization-wise it’s part of the FUNORSAL foundation and is expected to bring some funds for the organization to be used in its many development activities. However for the past years it has had some challenges in productivity. What I’ve started to do is to try understand, and later get ideas for improvement in, the whole process starting from the providers of wool to the sales of the end product. This is pretty cool, since I get to go back to the basics of what I studied – order penetration points, batches, work-in-process and all the other terms and tools – and extend it a bit. I’ve been scrolling a PhD thesis of a colleague about the Theory of Constraints (link) and got some ideas what to do. They have quite a lot of statistical data, but it’s mostly on a monthly or yearly level. Talking with the workers most of the challenges caused by different fluctuations are on a daily or weekly level – causing liquidity issues and longer lead times than the customer wishes. So I need to get hold of that kind of data first. hiland_! For my research all this is just part of the set-up phase. I intend to use the findings to engage the management of the factory, including some workers, to improve the process in a much more visual and participatory way. Since the goal is to find out if more designerly methods contribute to the capabilities of the staff, I’m planning to occupy a small space in the factory and put up a small scale mock-up model of the factory processes there. Paper layout of the factory, some wood-blocks acting as WIP items, some figures as staff memebers, visual hints of cash flow and so on… By communicating through such a tool and a model I hope to have an effect on the capabilities of the organisation – and of course improve the efficiency of the plant. Hope to see if that works out : ) Not exactly what originally planned, but so far the best trade-off between the PhD thesis research and having a concrete impact on what’s going on in the village. I still aim to get some of the other factories through a process somewhat like this and maybe get the representatives of different factories to work together. That would be closer to what I planned – developing business jointly among various enterprises. FUENTE: modosalinerito.com