Case Study: Workplace
Efficiency ImprovementIron Ore, Mobile Maintenance - Pilbara, WA, Australia
The Challenge
Our clients’ Mobile Maintenance department was seeking to understand how it could increase the portion of time the Supervisors spent actively supervising, rather than completing non-value adding work.
The department also wanted to understand how the Supervisors were being utilised and determine where opportunities existed for other process improvements.
The goal of the project was to develop a roadmap for improvements in the team’s processes, roles and responsibilities.
The Solution
Working directly with the client, EnterpriseIS completed a “Day in life of” (DILO) study of the Supervisors across the Mobile Maintenance department. This study was conducted over a representative sample of shifts (both day and night) in order to capture all activities they would be expected to complete during a normal working week.
The outcomes of this study included the following:
- Documented all actual work done over the period, broken down into activity, activity type and mode of Supervision.
- Identification of value vs non-value adding activities
- Identifying core work activities
- Identify planning guidelines for major activities required by each role
- Identify sources of wasted time (“noise”) for each role
- Establish action plans to reduce wasted time.
The project was completed onsite over a six-week period of operations, with findings and recommendations presented to the leadership team.
The Results
The project delivered accurate data on the breakdown of the activities currently being completed by each role, with an identification of value add vs non-value add activities and list of other opportunities found during the study.
Based on this information, the site management team was able to establish the role requirements of a Supervisor for each department, with a road map to transition from current state to future state, thus enabling greater active supervision with a reduction in site head-count.