Category Archives: Manufacturing

Britain Promotes Apprenticeships to Help its Industrial Base

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JANUARY 20, 2014

British apprentice learning high-integrity weldingDespite relatively high unemployment in Britain, especially among young people, there is a marked shortage of skilled manufacturing workers, writes The New York Times (Jan. 20, 2014). The problem is so acute that the government and industrial companies are behind an unprecedented push to get teenagers into apprenticeships to close that gap. The British government is trying to catch up with Germany and Switzerland, which have retained their competitive edge with the help of well-honed apprenticeship programs.
 
A third of employers across Europe say that the lack of skills is causing major business problems in terms of higher costs, insufficient quality and lost time. 27% of the 2,600 companies surveyed by McKinsey note they have left an entry-level vacancy unfilled over the past year because there were no eligible applicants. Statistics like that, and the fact that about a quarter of people under 25 are jobless in Europe, prompted Britain to act, committing £1.57 billion to apprenticeship training last year. About 2.7 million new jobs in British manufacturing are expected by 2020, of which 1.9 million will require engineering skills. Companies will need to double both the current number of qualified recruits and of apprenticeships to fill those positions.

Britain is among the worst in the developed world at equipping its young people with numeracy and literacy skills. The career aspirations of high school students showed them to be heavily skewed toward jobs in acting, media and professional sports. Part of the challenge for Britain is turning around the bad reputation that apprenticeships can have, often being associated with dull, menial tasks that evoke images of Oliver Twist, the Dickens character who faced life as an apprentice to a chimney sweep. Britain has a record of apprenticeships back to medieval times, when boys were hired as young as 7 and often worked in brutal conditions.

 
 
This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

Trying to Close French Factories Can Lead to “Boss-napping”

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JANUARY 14, 2014

Workers set tires on fire at this French Goodyear plant where 2 execs were held hostage

Negotiations broke down last week at a Goodyear tire factory scheduled for closing in northern France, so employees kidnapped the bosses. Hundreds of employees held two senior executives captive, threatening to detain them until the company agreed to pay out “huge amounts of money” to nearly 1,200 workers about to lose their jobs. The revival of the French unions’ “boss-napping” tactic clearly causes concerns of multinationals about France as a place to locate, reports The New York Times (Jan. 8, 2014). “This happened because workers were desperate,” said a French prof. “But it is still an act that will underline the perception that it’s difficult to do business in France.”

Tension at the Goodyear plant flared last year after Maurice Taylor, CEO of an American tire company, Titan International, rejected a government appeal to step in and buy the plant. Taylor described French workers as loafers of minimal productivity. “In the U.S., we call this kidnapping,” he stated. “These people would be arrested and prosecuted. But in France, your government does nothing — it’s crazy.”

France’s rigid labor market and the influence of labor unions has long been a source of aggravation to employers. The country’s 3,200-page labor code embodied what the government acknowledged was a “cult of regulation” that choked business. Procedures for shedding workers when economic conditions deteriorate are lengthy and expensive, and businesses pay high taxes to help fund France’s social welfare system. For an employee earning 1,200 euros a month, employers pay an additional €1,000 in tax and pension costs. Unions at the Goodyear plant had been demanding severance packages of €80,000 ($110,000) plus €2,500 for each year worked.

In recent years, French employees took executives of Caterpillar hostage when talks over revamping the company’s operation broke down, trapped the CEO of the group that owns Gucci, while bosses at 3M and Sony were held in an attempt to get bigger severance packages.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

Tesla and a Factory Full of Robots

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JANUARY 9, 2014

teslaElon Musk recently made the cover ofFortune (Dec.9, 2013) as its 2013 Business Person of the Year for his famous creation of both Tesla and Space X.  The article recalls that just a few years back, the best most people could say about electric cars was that they would be great for sustainability, but for the foreseeable future they’d be horribly limited by range and wouldn’t be very appealing to drive. Battery technology was simply too expensive and too heavy for it to be otherwise. The key breakthrough was to switch to lithium-ion battery technology, an expensive technology used not in cars, but in computers and phones.  Musk believed that if you could combine large enough numbers of lithium-ion cells into a single battery, you could provide not only adequate range for a car but also power capable of turning the humble electric car into an object of desire.

Musk wasn’t the first person to have that insight. His genius was to take that core idea to its logical conclusion and integrate it into a broader picture of how a series of such cars could be manufactured and marketed for ever-shrinking costs, in a sequence that would eventually bring Tesla to the mass market. A full seven years ago, he posted an article titled “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan,” which outlined the basics: three generations of cars, first the super high-end sports car, then a sporty 4-door family car, then a mass market car. And underpinning it all, the conviction that the cars wouldn’t just work, but be lusted after.

He had no certainty that the company would succeed. But he was convinced that (a) the laws of physics meant that electric power could deliver a profoundly better automobile, (b) there was a path to possible success via three generations of cars, and (c) the goal was essential if humanity was to have a shot at a sustainable-energy future. This  5 minute video of the Tesla S production is one your students will enjoy as it shows the power of robotics in manufacturing

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.