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Branch news: Yorkshire Branch - Visit to Portakabin - Manufacturing control Article
The article entitled: "Branch news: Yorkshire Branch - Visit to Portakabin" is in the Manufacturing control Articles section of Operations Management Papers area...
ARTICLE DESCRIPTION: The first meeting of the Yorkshire Branch for a long, long time was organised by Paul Scott, at Portakabin, York, on 10 November. Unfortunately only a limited number of the members who applied to attend, managed to come, those ‘not showing’ perhaps being put off by the crash on the A64!
MORE INFO: Branch news: Yorkshire Branch - Visit to Portakabin The first meeting of the Yorkshire Branch for a long, long time was organised by Paul Scott, at Portakabin, York, on 10 November. Unfortunately only a limited number of the members who applied to attend, managed to come, those ‘not showing’ perhaps being put off by the crash on the A64! For those braving the cold and the road problems, the visit was well worth the effort. Paul Scott, the Operations Director and Martin Kennedy explained the challenges in running a business that is part manufacturing and part construction, by means of a talk and a tour of the 60-acre site. But first a few misconceptions were removed – Portakabin may have started in 1961 as those small temporary units on building sites, but now produces modular steel framed prefabricated units for making hospitals, offices, schools, residential flats and those small temporary units on building sites. Indeed the meeting started in just such a prefabricated office block. Nick Lawrence’s famous film of putting up a house in the USA by 10,000 people in 90 minutes was almost beaten by putting up a children's nursery by 3 men and a crane in 120 minutes. Portakabin has always been part of the Shepherd Building Group, still a private company, and the Portakabin division (which incorporates the Yorkon brand) now has a turnover of£150 million per annum, employs 1,300 and operates across Europe, though only manufactures in York. The operations problem is that the product lines incorporate virtually every combination of production type: Design and build one off projects (eg. a hospital) Engineer and build multiples for one contract (eg. flats consisting of standard units joining together to form one whole) Large multi-contract make to order (eg. making a large number of McDonalds to standard design when required) Standard product made to stock (for Portakabin rentals, still an important side of the business). Thus Portakabin have the standard ‘project’ orientated manufacturing problems made worse by civil engineering contracts and quantity surveyors. This is not making variants of cars to sell in vast numbers. A number of actions have been taken to ameliorate these control problems. Particularly effective has been the re-organisation of ‘operations’ (pre and post production) into multifunctional project teams. These teams include everything needed from quoting for jobs through to issuing to production and then to delivery to site and overseeing installation up to hand over. Use of the team structure has enhanced workflow and responsibility and has removed unnecessary levels of management. Action is still in progress to simplify components and Bills of Material. SAP was hurriedly implemented in 6 months to meet the millenium and it took several years to sort out the resultant problems. Now there is continuing action to reduce components (halved but still 23,000) and BOMs (still 7 levels). They are moving to supplier controlled inventory (fixings are now in this system) and cellular manufacturing and are trying to make supplier partnerships work. The company uses a simple manual rough cut capacity planning system, interestingly based upon typifying each production unit as a multiple of their simplest (yes, that site hut again) and planning upon producing 250 per week. Portakabin is very strict in booking orders into this system when orders are confirmed and holding their ground when customers try to bring the delivery date forward. It also helps that they can fill gaps with producing standard product for the rental divisions (Repeat, this is a lot harder than making cars to order). Other interesting points were that the ISO 9001 manual is made available everywhere in flow chart form. Also the level of customer satisfaction is monitored on every contract by a separate group and feedback given so that teams can identify where they failed to manage the customer’s expectations and their own performance. Portakabin’s frustrations included the fact that too often developers insisted upon utilising and spending money upon third party architects and surveyors who knew little of factory built units. Portakabin then had to re-design, negotiate and spend time to make the result suitable for factory build, with its benefits of fixed costs and rapid build and installation. After the tour, we were made to work for our suppers by suggesting uses for the window cut outs that consist of foam between two sheets of steel. I don’t think we did too well, but remember you first heard of Yorkon insulated dog kennels and Portakabin ‘easilay’ loft insulation here. Thanks for all the work organising the event, Paul. It was great to visit a market leading company continuing to improve and hearing how it has overcome many of its problems. Perhaps members need to recognise that an important part of their development is not being busy doing their own jobs, but seeing how other do theirs and identifying how much is transferable to company. Never confuse activity with action! We shall organise further events shortly. Peter Catton, FIOM MAS Yorkshire and Humbe
PUBLISHER: Institute of Operations Management
Page number: 7 Word count: 825
Vol 31 - No 01 - February 2005
The article can be downloaded in full from the publisher's site i.e. the Institute of Operations Management.
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