Look at you sideways
Company LLC MPP Yuzhnoye can probably be called a city-forming company, but officially it is not yet, as it continues to grow and develop. It exists since 2018, the main activity is the production of chilled and frozen meat. There are a lot of people working here, about three hundred people, the bulk of the work is done in five workshops. The company produces more than one hundred items of products. The geography of deliveries ranges from Kaliningrad to Sakhalin. Why did you need to take part in the national “Labour Productivity” project?
“The national project is a very interesting idea,” says Svetlana Gugasyan, plant manager. – The external situation has changed, the demand for our products is increasing every day, and we realized that we had to make a breakthrough in development. But how? Why? In this race, you suddenly realize that at a certain stage of development there is a slight stagnation due to lack of experience. In order to stay in the market and continue to grow, you have to look a few steps ahead. They were breaking certain stereotypes, you had to look at the whole production with different eyes, like from the outside. This opportunity was given to us by the national project.
Since April 2022, specialists from the Regional Competence Center, together with the Ministry of Economy of the Krasnodar Territory, have been training the company’s team in Lean technologies.
At the beginning, it was difficult, explains the director. We started with the basics: line employees were trained in lean manufacturing programs on the electronic platform of the national project, the main specialists of the company were trained in a unique program “Productivity Leaders”. This gave the company the basis for the project.
“We analyzed the entire production process step by step, all the flows where the duplication operations take place,” explains Svetlana Gugasyan. – At certain stages, they were identified up to three or four. These operations suppressed, reduced production time, eliminated unnecessary movements of raw materials and finished products and thus increased production. When our RCC project manager, Dmitry Tarasov, visited the warehouse, the first thing he noticed was the storage chaos, he convinced us of the opportunity to change the system. And we decided to introduce address storage in a warehouse. We argued for a long time, because people are used to different storage scheme. It was necessary to make a revolution in the spirits. The storekeeper came to the warehouse and kept all the information in his head: I put this there, that one there. Today, the warehouse is divided into zones where products are located according to certain parameters. Each rack has a storage scheme. Such a system and visualization speed up the search process and the product loading time is reduced.
The company also gradually introduced the 5C system, which involves competent organization of the workplace and the use of visual cues to achieve the goal.
“To be honest, when I saw what changes needed to be made in the company, I thought that at some stage of the reorganization we would lose money,” says Svetlana Gugasyan. — But fortunately, the transition period passed quickly and every day we increased production. We expected labor productivity to increase by 5-6%. But according to the results of the project, these figures have been exceeded: our labor productivity has increased by thirty percent!
Spaghetti is not pasta
We were invited for a small company visit. After having changed clothes and passed the health checks, we find ourselves in the “clean zone” and enter the boning workshop.
“At the beginning of this year, we launched a new production line in the deboning workshop,” explains our company guide, head of the legal department Tamara Lyashenko. “Thanks to the national project, we managed to transfer such a large workshop to a new mode, the rapid adaptation of staff and the establishment of a new production process allowed us to increase production. We were thinking of launching the workshop for more than one housing estate, but we reconfigured in just a few days.
“The actual capacity of the workshop is fifty-five to sixty tons per day, the maximum production capacity is one hundred tons of products per day,” Galina Gosheva, the company’s technologist, joins the conversation. “Because we changed some production processes during the national project, it became much more convenient to work. Each deboner began to process an additional five to seven half carcasses per shift. As a result, production increased.
But the most interesting work on the national project was carried out in the lard workshop. It was on the example of this workshop that the team studied the Spaghetti diagram.
This marvelous lean manufacturing tool has nothing to do with pasta. If we transfer all the steps of the staff during the working day to paper, such a diagram appears like tangled pasta. She received the name “spaghetti”. This simple technique makes it possible to estimate local, temporal and spatial losses.
“We stood with a timer, measured the movements of employees around the store,” says Tamara Lyashenko. “We analyzed at which stages time is lost, which are duplicated. After the analysis, we rearranged the equipment and the processes went faster. Before participating in the national project, the production per person in this workshop per shift was 376 kilograms of products, and after the completion of the national project – 490 kilograms per person.
Furthermore, following the example of this workshop, the working group of the national project produced a skills matrix. What it is?
“We found which operation is easier for whom, then, taking into account the skills of the workers, we redistributed them throughout the process”, explains Tamara Lyashenko. “There is a team contract in this workshop, and as a result, the team has become capable of giving the best result. After all, everyone in their workplace has done what they do best.
Let’s feed everyone!
If anyone is worried that tomorrow there will be difficult times with food due to the sanctions, then Svetlana Gugasyan reassures: “We will feed everyone!”
Today, new opportunities are opening up for our processing companies to expand the sales market. Kuban has always been famous for its delicious products. And the more of them, the better for our economy and ordinary consumers.
Svetlana Gugasyan shared her plans:
“Now the national project has opened up new opportunities for us, including business expansion. We want to establish the production of deeper processed meat products. We will start producing semi-finished products – now there is a demand for this. We intend to take advantage of concessional funding from the State Program Pishchevik of the Krasnodar Territory Industrial Development Fund. We have already applied for a preferential loan of 29.9 million rubles, which we will spend on the purchase of new equipment for the future deep processing workshop.
By the way, reduced rates for obtaining a preferential loan exist in the Krasnodar Territory for holders of the sign “Made in Kuban” and participants of the national project “Labour Productivity”. This support measure is unique because it is intended for investment projects aimed at improving existing production or creating a new one. And for the next five years, it is planned to increase annual production by twenty to thirty percent – these are new jobs, taxes and social development of the enterprise.
“We cooperate very closely with the Ministry of Economy of the Krasnodar Territory, the Regional Competence Center,” says Svetlana Gugasyan. — From November 2022, we started to implement the next stage of the project, in other structural divisions of the company. Above all, people are involved in all these processes. We realized that at a certain stage, only the salary ceases to stimulate employees. We need to involve them in our goals, they understand that together we are a team, then labor productivity and material well-being will increase. And even small, purely human promptings help us move towards our goal.
Speaking of “purely human incentives”. When leaving, we saw a large number of employee cars at the checkpoint, there is even a problem with parking spaces.
“Now we’re thinking about providing the best parking spots to employees who score high at the end of the month,” they told the company.
Nothing, but nice.
For your information
Today, 230 Kuban enterprises involved in the basic non-primary sectors of the economy participate in the national project “Labour Productivity”. By 2024, it is expected to involve at least 243 regional organizations in the project.
MK cipher
48.5 billion rubles – this is the economic effect of the implementation of the national project “Labour Productivity” in the Kuban in 2022.
