Contract Labour - Does it actually save costs?
September 16th, 2009Contract labour and labour brokers are being hotly debated in parliament. But we need to be more concerned about how we utilise the service than the morality of it.
A Good Root Cause Analysis Starting Point
July 6th, 2009A manufacturer of electrical component assemblies supplying the auto industry found that they were paying about R500 000 per month for the air-freight of parts that were being delivered to them. Everybody that I interviewed in the company told me that this was caused by the dramatic variation in the …
Selective Morality’s Impact On Incident Investigations
June 11th, 2009Most South Africans keep quiet when undercharged for a meal. In an article in the Sunday Times of 7 June 2009, Subashini Naidoo writes about a survey by market research specialists TNS Research Surveys.
The study looks at how South Africans deal with everyday moral decisions and reveals that we are …
The Effect Of A Simple Meeting At Shift Change-over
June 9th, 2009On the night of July 6, 1988, an explosion and fire aboard the Piper Alpha oil drilling platform killed most of the crew. The disaster began with a routine maintenance procedure. On the morning of the 6th of July, a backup propane condensate pump (which removed liquids from the natural …
Avoid “Death by PowerPoint”…
June 1st, 2009It is difficult to believe that some training courses are still run on the “Death by PowerPoint” premise - those courses where the presenter pulls out his laptop and projector, and proceeds to expound on his impressive slides that illustrate the most wonderful theories.
You have probably had to endure some …
Procrastination: Killing Projects…
May 14th, 2009One of the biggest criticisms of Root Cause Failure Analysis interventions is the number of projects that are never completed, a lot of which are ultimately abandoned.
What a waste! All that effort put into solving a problem, and the solution doesn’t get implemented.
This phenomenon is evident in a lot of …
Harold has 30 years of management and consulting experience in Operations and is a qualified mechanical engineer with an MBA. He has managed a number of factories, with products varying from lifts and electric cables to sweets, as well as consulted to numerous manufacturing and service organisations.
