Clerk Clare Johnson (aka August's Kaizen of the Month!) has become the talk of the Trim & Final line after her slick thinking helped put an end to a very messy process involving hand sanitizer dispensers, which will save Halewood over £40,000 a year in cost savings.
Fed up with being drowned in gel every-time she cleaned her hands, Clare, who’s duties include filling the hand sanitizer stations in T&F and OTA, decided to take action and investigate the level of solution dispensed at each pump and was gobsmacked by her findings.
Clare said: “You only need 1ml of gel to sanitize your hands, yet our pumps were pouring out 35ml each time- so an extra 34ml then was actually needed. “This seemed crazy to me, not only because people were left in a slippery mess by the end of it but using more solution comes at a cost, at a time where we need to save as much as we can for our business.”
With the help of Mark Williams in the Kaizen team, Clare has invented a restrictor device for the dispensers which limits the flow of solution coming out for people sanitizing their hands, whilst still giving them the option of accessing larger volumes required for filling bottles.
This has meant each container can now get up to 5000 uses per bottle, compared to 142 before and the restrictors have now been rolled out to all hand sanitizer stations on T&F and OTA.
However Clare’s canny thinking didn’t stop there as she turned “Columbo” once more to investigate the costs the T&F department were splashing out on each hand sanitizer container.
She found that the containers could be bought elsewhere much cheaper so negotiated with the supplier to reduce the price per unit by over two thirds.
Instead of paying £42 per hand gel container, the department now pays £13.75 resulting in an additional £10,000 saving per year for Halewood, bringing Clare’s total to more than £40,000.
Nick Teasdale, Manufacturing Manager for T&F, said: “Clare’s can do attitude is a shining example for everyone at Halewood. Its small ideas like this that help us to change our culture and processes at a time where our costs are too high and we need to be more efficient.
“Challenge everything and ask yourself what you can do to save time and ultimately bring costs down for our business- that’s exactly what Clare has done.
“I am so proud of our people and the passion that’s being displayed through the Kaizens, so keep on with the cracking work as it’s making Halewood more competitive and sustainable and helping us in our journey to become the plant of choice for Jaguar Land Rover.”
