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 Founded just over 100 years ago in 1908, Northern Automotive Systems is a leading supplier of nameplate and decorative trim to a variety of markets, offering a one stop; design, engineering, program management, test lab and tool shops.
With a combined space of over 1,000,000 square feet, Northern Automotive Systems has the flexibility and capacity to run small to multimillion piece jobs, making quality control a key issue across multiple manufacturing plant and teams.
With a large and diverse workforce who work on many different jobs in one shift, on the job training on each manufacturing process was imperative to keep quality high and scrap to a minimum. Taking staff away from the workplace to train on specific processes is not ideal and has a knock on affect on production capacity reducing time spent on the job and the businesses ability to turn around jobs in the short timescales customers demand. The solution identified was to create a series of training videos for each process, available on-demand at each station for staff to access as and when required. Using an external video production company to create these was however judged prohibitively expensive and didn’t give Northern the ability to improve and create new content on a regular basis without further expense, there was an unacceptable delay in turnaround time and simply wasn’t cost effective for smaller jobs.
Kidderminster College’s solution was to help supervisors create their own training videos in-house for direct use at work stations in order to facilitate the high quality required in production.
David Compton, of Northern Automotive Systems explains; ‘This was a great solution to a productivity issue allowing staff to quickly change from one job to another according to the order. Training employees to produce instant videos on a fast changing high quality production line has saved us thousands, improved quality and enabled staff with almost no experience of this type of work become very efficient in record time. It would have cost thousands if brought off the shelf and would not have been so re-active.”
Paul Garnault, Head of Creative Industries at Kidderminster College, continued; “What to us seemed like a simple and intuitive solution had been considered by Northern but dismissed as too complex and time consuming for staff to manage. We proved that in a reasonably short amount of time digital video technology and production methods could be taught to staff with little or no experience. This is a great example of a successful and cost effective method of empowering business with the use of modern digital technology.”
For further information on Kidderminster College digital solutions contact Paul at: pgarnault@kidderminster.ac.uk
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