Reducing Turnover at a Meatpacking Plant
Meatpacking plants were the forerunners of many production innovations. Around 1880, meatpackers in the American Midwest created conveyors that moved carcasses steadily toward the workers so they could take the meat off the bone; a typical example of a deboning process, or of disassembling the animal.
Inspired by this revolutionary initiative, in 1926 Henry Ford transformed vehicle assembly by creating mass production, with material flow automated by thousands of conveyors through different types of manufacturing steps, all the way to a moving final assembly line. Thus, the animal disassembly line in the meatpacking plant served as the inspiration for the emergence of the automobile assembly line.
The mass or flow production created by Henry Ford was, in turn, the great inspiration for Taiichi Ohno in creating and developing the Toyota Production System, the basis of the lean management philosophy. Given the limits and difficulties of the low-variety Fordist system, Toyota took Ford's mass production a leap forward, with greater variety, quality and productivity.
For us at Lean Institute Brasil, Ford's assembly process and the meatpacking plant's disassembly process should both follow the same approach created by Ohno. Go to the gemba, look for and eliminate waste, and involve people in that endeavor.
That is what we did at a meatpacking plant located in western Santa Catarina. In 2009 we began applying the lean philosophy in a pilot process in the production of breaded products (Cordon Bleu), in the processed foods area, which is the highest-volume line, with a growing market that required overtime to meet demand.
We gradually overcame the difficulties and made the necessary adaptations to the methodology for this specific case, which was becoming a great challenge for the working group.
After 1 year , the results achieved were a 30% increase in productivity and a 50% reduction in rework.
The company then decided to expand to the other lines and plants. Currently, in addition to the Santa Catarina plant, we are applying the lean methodology at other plants of the same group under the coordination of corporate engineering. At the end of 2010, we began work in the poultry area in Santa Catarina and, in particular, while we were discussing the value stream map that covered the chicken thigh deboning area, the plant's general manager challenged the working group with the following demand: “We need to reduce people turnover, which at that time (early 2011) was 8%”.
The general manager's concern was well founded, since we have 4 thigh deboning tables and each table has 54 people. Replacing people, besides being costly, caused great instability in the process, with variation in cycle times and variation in work quality through the losses caused by excess meat left on the bone, making standardization of the work extremely difficult.
The natural indicators of production leveling, to bring cycle times to small variations close to takt time, and the development of standardized work to improve quality were easily absorbed by the working group; reducing turnover, however, seemed an unfamiliar and challenging task, yet a fundamental one.
Reducing turnover from 8% to 4% was set as the project's target and added to the A3, even though on the day the A3 was signed the group had not the slightest idea of how to do it.
The training program and the application of lean tools on the thigh lines proceeded as planned.
We decided to involve the HR people and train all of their leaders so that we could reflect on “The role of HR in the lean enterprise”.
At that moment we remembered the wise observations of Mr. Cho (former president of Toyota): “Give them the work as if it were their own”; “Let them think, let them try”; “Reflect”.
In addition to the HR leaders, we included the plant's occupational physician and psychologist in the working group.
A great deal of information and data on the turnover problem was gathered, followed by analyses using Pareto charts and other tools to identify the causes and reasons for turnover on the thigh lines. The physician and the psychologist built these charts from interviews with the people who were leaving the company (over 3 months).
After 6 months of work, the group was already implementing the actions proposed in the A3 action plan, such as:
- Ergonomics. The occupational physician worked intensively on detailing the deboning process, and the effort for each standardized cut was measured and defined so that the person's effort for this deboning operation would not exceed 20% of that person's maximum effort. If this were followed, the effort would not lead the person to fatigue, the work would be more comfortable, and the person would have more adequate ergonomic conditions, without suffering the damage of repetitive strain.
- Personnel selection. When a person is a candidate for thigh deboning, they now first go through an initial test, which is the measurement of maximum effort by squeezing a torque meter; the value shown on the torque meter in KGF must be at least 5 times the previously measured deboning force. If this does not happen, the person is automatically not approved for this job.
- Onboarding of new employees. The onboarding time for new employees for the thigh tables, which used to be 7 days, was extended to 30 days, because the group created a standard table outside the production lines to prepare people with standardized work before they went to production;
- Standardized Work. Standardized Work with visual management was created so that people, when they went to production, would already have their cycle time close to takt and meat losses on the bone around 13%, as planned, thus ensuring a stable process.
With this, the people profile and the work content were redefined and, as a result, turnover kept falling, reaching around 2% in 2012.
Even after all these years of improvements in technological and social conditions, the work environment in meatpacking plants remains difficult in terms of working conditions all over the world.
But the implementation of lean concepts helped improve working conditions while also contributing to improved productivity and quality, with cost reductions.
The group's reflection was based on the following motto: WE DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE, SO WE DID IT.
