MAKING THE MOST OF WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE

Thanks to some extra pairs of hands during the recent Solihull non-production week, a small team of money-saving superstars cashed close to £60,000 in re-utilising production equipment – all in five days.

You may have read in Team Talk recently that Solihull was a hive of activity during its recent non-production week. The downtime enabled colleagues at Lode Lane a chance to pause, reflect and in some instances, some colleagues used their time to save our business lots of cash, setting up their own mini circular economy.

 Associates Michael Simmons and Bhajna Ram normally spend their day jobs building fantastic Range Rovers and Range Rover Sports in FA1. Bhajna commented, “We were given the opportunity to spend our Stand-Down week over in Body Shop 2, doing something different to what we normally do when production is running. We didn’t know that by the end of the week we were going to help save thousands of pounds for our business.”
 

Michael and Bhajna were shown the ropes by Jeff Bazeley, a Maintenance Leader in Solihull’s Body in White and Technical Group Leader, Shaun Holland. Jeff explained, “We’re currently preparing Body Shop 2 to be the home of body construction for future generations of Range Rover. The team has placed a big focus on keeping investment costs down and one way we are trying to do this is by reusing old equipment.”
 

Our Body Shops across JLR are full of amazing technology, all of which costs significant amounts to develop and install. Jeff continued, “We will be reutilising a large number of robots in the Body Shop, saving us lots of cash but we wanted to take it another step further and understand what else we could save. We focused our attention on the extra little bits such as sensors, cables and tubes. Some of our sensors can cost up to £750 each, so by putting them aside and testing them to make sure they still work - we can reuse them later on down the line as spares.”

Over the five day non-production week, Jeff and the team tested hundreds of sensors, cables and feed tubes – all of which will be fed back into the maintenance process as spares. Looking at the mountain of equipment in the ‘to be reused’ pile, it was clear to see they have made a great contribution towards Project Charge – close to £60,000 in fact. Jeff, Shaun, Michael and Bhajna we salute you. 

What is your great cost-saving idea? For more information on how you can submit an idea into Project Charge, please click here.