Sustainable training of employees

The Geberit Group is the European market leader in sanitary products. The production network comprises 35 production sites. With 700 employees, Geberit Mapress produces 55 million metal press fittings per year for water, air, steam and gas installations at its Langenfeld site. Growth in the market required short-term capacity growth, which could not be achieved by installing new production lines.

Problem

In the past, Geberit Mapress had various training programmes for their employees, but unfortunately this did not lead to well-trained employees on the shop floor. The employees quickly seemed to forget what they had learned, and internally the following saying was used: "Learned in the morning, forgotten in the evening". Because we were not satisfied with this, we wondered what the reason was and what we could do about it. And so we came into contact with the TWI methods and the TWI Institute.

Application

In order to prepare us well for the implementation of the training method, some of the managers attended an introduction workshop one day, where the TWI Methods and a number of implementation questions were discussed. We decided to start a pilot in two smaller, defined production environments. In the first training the management was trained in Job Relations and Job Instruction and a number of tasks on the shop floor were developed into trainable concrete instructions.

We then internally trained two trainers to become TWI certified Job Instruction trainers, so that they could independently deliver the next Job Instruction training on the shop floor within the organisation and spread the training programme throughout the site.

After the first training the people could immediately start giving instructions on the work floor and the following Job Breakdowns were made and instructed by our own people in order to create a more stable process.

Results

During the implementation of TWI Job Instruction we learned that we should keep the focus of instruction on the problem areas. We do not train to train, but to solve problems. That's why we use the system to monitor the process on a daily basis and also to monitor improvements on a daily basis. For example, we can see that the conversion times of our installations have decreased after the introduction of TWI Job Instruction and have continued to decrease due to daily improvements. These improvements are the result of employees becoming much more aware of the content of the work: What do I have to do, How do I do it, and Why do I have to do it that way?