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The C1113 Hyster Stacker truck had a lot of components that
needed fitting together and the target for a team of 9 girls was
200 pieces per hour. The previous day they had only achieved in
eight hours a total of 504 pieces with 10 girls, with an
additional 40 made that were not of a high enough standard. We
had to make a total of 50,000 pieces which at this rate would
take us forever. The moral was low as the girls’ bonuses
depended on reaching 1800 pieces a day. Part of the problem was
the fit of the components, being a new release the debugging of
the parts hadn’t been fully completed. This was an important
lesson to learn, as to try and assemble a product that is not
fully developed is a waste of time and money. The best thing to
do was to stop the production and correct the fits, it seemed
obvious, but in a large factory with so many pressures nobody
had made that
decision - so I did. The windows were too tight
and the assembly line wasn’t correct so I spent the day with the
10 girls reworking all the components and changing the layout of
the assembly operation. At the end of the day I filled in the
production sheets and handed them in to the assembly manager. I
hadn’t got far down the corridor before there was a yell behind
me, the assembly manager went berserk as he had just seen that
our production for the day was zero, on top of which I had
promised to cover the girls full bonuses, I thought he was going
to kill me. I was told in no uncertain terms that tomorrow had
to be different. Fortunately for me it was. As with the new set
up and the components fitting together we belted them out and
produced the 1800 pieces - to be honest we made 1900 pieces but
we kept 100 back towards the next day. Over the years I was
never surprised to see products being produced that weren’t
correctly developed, usually because there was a demand
pressure.Christmas was nearing and I was warned about the antics of the last day, you had to experience it to believe it. In a factory full of mainly women you would not believe what they got up to, when I tell people today I’m sure they think I’m making it up. We would start at 7.30am as usual and by 9.00am many of the girls were already suffering from the effects of alcohol - there would always be one or two who had fainted. By 10.00am you would get no sense out of them, but if you were stupid enough to be around at this time - lookout !!! Many innocent apprentices would find themselves short of a few items of clothing and running for cover, at the time it was quite scary. With Christmas over 1977 was coming to an end, what joys would I have in he New Year.
