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Project Swift | Business Process Improvement Project
What is project Swift?
Project Swift is the code name for a Business Process Improvement Project aimed at delivering positive change across the areas of Safety, Quality, Delivery, People, and Cost, supporting our Premium Automotive customer in their cost saving initiatives.
Who was involved?
There was a collaborative approach from start to finish, which involved both my team and our customer. Jake Humphries, Stuart Evans, Simon Gould, and Kevin West were all involved, along with the FS and Engines Packing Teams to implement the improvements during our Whit week shutdown.
What activities were carried out ?
We used the DMAIC approach to improve our existing processes, initially defining what we wanted to achieve with our customer and analysing the operation to identify the gaps between the current state and the destination. This allowed the collaboration between engineering and operations teams a clear path of improvements which they bought to life visualising the end result with 3D software. This was used to check the solutions before the teams implemented them. We changed the layout of the shop floor, modified the processes, at each step, taking advice of the employees working in these areas. Of course on reaching our goal we celebrated our success with the team.
What was the effect?
1. We made a substantial cost per car reduction for our customer.
2. We reduced our electricity usage by 562 KW/h per week. The creation of this electricity produces 2689 kg of CO2 per year which is roughly equivalent to the CO2 emitted by a 737 flying from London to Pune and would take 130 trees a whole year to absorb.
3. We separated 51 metres of pedestrian / MHE shared routes making it safer for our employees to move around the warehouse. That’s more than the length of eleven Premium SUV’s parked end to end!
4. We reduced the walking distance that each of our packers does each week by almost 5 Kilometres per week. Over a year that is the equivalent of over 97 marathons, walking from Birmingham to Bucharest to Baku!
