Bringing together a cross-functional team – from 4 different sites and 6 different teams – and asking them to make a difference in 48 hours is a big ask…read on to see how this Unipart Team did just that.
Late one Friday evening, one of our client’s sent us a distress call asking for our help. Of course, Unipart, being Unipart, said “Yes”! A problem was occurring in one of the client’s pallet storage areas, whereby packaging destined for the supply chain was getting bottle-necked on site. The knock-on effect of this was that freight providers delivering product and collecting empties were becoming frustrated, and in some cases the dwell time on site for a trailer to drop and collect had risen to between 8 and 12 hours.
That evening, a cross functional team of volunteers from across the Unipart businesses – from 4 different sites and 6 separate teams – were pulled together. The team had never worked together before, but used their common knowledge of The Unipart Way to quickly identify the key issues and planned how to put things right. By Monday morning, teams were in place to cover both day and night shifts, and soon started to make a real difference. But the team didn’t stop there. They looked at how they could make it better for the customer. They looked at the data used to manage the dwell time for trailers. Within 4 weeks the team had reduced tipping time from 8-12 hours to just 1 hour, putting stability back into the operation. They reduced excess stillages and created thousands of square feet of floor space via the removal of scrap, excess and damaged pallets.
The team understood how important this issue was for the customer, acted flexibly using their initiative to make a very real difference to the stability of the client operation – richly deserving of one of our prestigious Mark in Action Awards.