Lever Fabergé engineers major changes at Merseyside factories

Citation

(2005), "Lever Fabergé engineers major changes at Merseyside factories", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 37 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2005.03737eab.002

Lever Fabergé engineers major changes at Merseyside factories

New skills acquired in two UK factories are being exported to Japan, as well as to other manufacturing centres in the UK and Europe.

A successful training programme brought about a 21 per cent increase in production efficiency in the pilot areas of the Lever Fabergé Home and Personal Care (HPCE) factories at Port Sunlight, on the Wirral, and Warrington, Cheshire, as well as reductions in planned maintenance time, breakdowns and accidents.

Lever Fabergé employs around 1,100 people at Port Sunlight and 250 at Warrington, and needed to improve the skills of more than 200 operators on detergent-packaging lines. A new role of technical operator would be created, responsible for routine maintenance, releasing engineers to concentrate on in-depth breakdown analysis and improvement engineering.

“The learning programme, which was accredited through a National Vocational Qualification, had to equip the operators with the skills and knowledge needed for safe operation of complex tasks,” said total productive maintenance leader Mal Corden. “The target was to have 80 per cent of routine low-complexity, high-frequency engineering maintenance tasks carried out by technical operators.”

All operators undertook off-site training at West Cheshire College’s Capenhurst Technology Centre, near Chester, and a rolling programme of courses enabled accessibility from different shift patterns. An intensive four-week block of training was developed, ensuring a set number of technical operators achieved their NVQs each month.

The operators themselves played a major role in producing manuals detailing every step in the maintenance process, and these eventually became the training manuals that set out the skills and knowledge needed to achieve the required performance standard.

“On completion of the training programme later this year we will have more than 200 qualified technical operators,” said Mal Corden. “The routine maintenance undertaken by engineers will then drop to just below 20 per cent, releasing them to concentrate on more in-depth work. Both the engineers and the technical operators are proud of their enhanced roles, and express high levels of job satisfaction. In addition, our safety record is now exemplary.”

The success of the programme has been recognized throughout Unilever. Visits have been made to the factories from sister plants in Hungary, The Netherlands and the rest of the UK, and three factories in the north west of England have started their own programme. The programme was also demonstrated to the Japanese Institute for Productive Maintenance, which subsequently requested more information and documentation developed during the programme.