Why Culture Matters in Manufacturing
In the business of manufacturing, culture can make or break even the best business plans. Manufacturing companies need to be making continual efforts to support positive culture, while investing in their workforce, their process, and their equipment to stay competitive in today’s global marketplace.
Why is culture so important? A positive culture that encourages long-term employment by providing a safe and effective environment for employee growth will experience a lower employee turnover rate. This leads to less training-related downtime and greater overall productivity. Employee efficiency rates in general can be massively affected by company culture. An engaged employee will bring a higher level of attention and energy to the work, and this results in greater output at improved quality.
The benefits of culture extend beyond the internal workforce. It is more important than ever to establish harmonious and diversified supplier relationships amidst the uncertainty of the post-pandemic world. It will be far easier to develop and nurture these relationships if internal employees uniformly portray the company in an inspiring way because they are engaged with and take ownership of the mission.
Continual investment in technology and equipment is paramount. New technologies are becoming available at a pace that most likely surpasses your ability to implement them; so how do you decide where to invest? The production staff can be an invaluable resource for input on questions like this. If they are empowered and engaged, they will be able to see potential bottlenecks, areas where improved quality control might be needed, and other pain points in the process. A company with a positive culture is more likely to see this information effectively travel from production staff to leadership.
ACS’s Culture Building Activities
Over the last 80+ plus years ACS has developed many programs aimed at building and maintaining the positive manufacturing culture we enjoy today.
Training:
First, we focus on training our employees well, including extensive onboarding for new hires striving to drive home the importance of ACS’s global mission to support noble industries and how their work directly contributes to this mission. New hire training can take up to a month depending on the employee’s role. Training continues after onboarding with Lean University: weekly training sessions focused on Lean topics including: Jidoka, Muda, Standard Work, TPM, Kaizen, Yokoten, and more.
Recognition:
We reward top performance with several programs for employees, including recognition for top Lean instructors, a redeemable points-for-prizes system for top performing staff members, rewards for top performing departments and more.
Empowerment:
ACS recognizes the vast potential for manufacturing insights and efficiency boosting suggestions originating within the production staff and captures these insights in employee workshops. As many as 45 workshops are held in any given year and each workshop focuses on a concrete statistical improvement goal, such as achieving lower scrap in a particular process. Management and floor staff work together to source potential solutions to these problems and employees are rewarded for any ideas that get implemented.
Frequent Audits:
The performance of each manufacturing department is regularly audited using a 5S framework in which top performing departments are rewarded.
Local Community Involvement:
ACS regularly makes donations to local charities in the communities where our employees live and work. We coordinated three separate bottle cap drives for Tapas Por Vidas last year. Proceeds from this charity go towards fighting childhood cancer, with specific Monterrey-area beneficiaries. We also organized around 30 community building events for employees each year ranging from Trivia Nights, to Best Mexican Dish Contests, Soccer Watch Parties and more.
Greater Manufacturing Community Engagement:
Our dedication to nurturing a positive manufacturing culture extends beyond our own workforce; we regularly share best manufacturing practices with other automotive companies in Monterrey, as well as with of our business partners around the globe.
Principles:
ACS is committed to LEAN manufacturing principles and ISO 9001 standards. We also maintain Six Sigma Certification.
It takes time and great leadership to build an effective manufacturing company culture as described above. If you are looking for a new supplier, you should make sure they are working on these things, like ACS Industries has been since 1939. Our business has flourished into a workforce of over 3,000 while remaining under the careful guidance of our family-owned leadership. We empower noble industries; we care about what we do, and this has resulted in an environment where both people and products prosper.