“How can we keep our heads above water in the supply chain?”

The Automotive industry is known for its progressive developments compared to other industries. Trying to stay ahead puts pressure on the business. Is your organization capable of handling rush orders, meeting high quality demands, keeping up with the customer's rapid product development, focusing on cost reduction, handling out of spec and/or delay in raw material delivery? Wouldn't it be great to stay ahead of these problems to get the feeling that you are in control?

“Of course we want to stay ahead of the problems, but how?”

Improvement programs like Six Sigma or Lean Manufacturing are well known in the Automotive industry. But how many companies are working with the people on the shop floor to really put these programs into practice? Only by including the people in your company that add the value to your product, can you make the necessary change:

Researching what determines the real added value for your customer;
Making improvement potential visible;
Using improvement techniques in multidisciplinary teams;
Working towards a process-oriented organisation of processes;
Emphasising the standardisation of improved working methods;
Accelerating the growth of skilled employees by stimulating personal development.

Six Sigma in the automotive industry

Now why is 'doing and feeling' for all of your employees so important? This has to do with the fact that improvement is and will remain a human activity! In one way or another, all employees must be encouraged to improve what they do. There are two fundamentally different ways of approaching this:

Very direct management
Commitment

Very direct management works as long as the presence of the person providing the management is felt. As soon as that ceases, the elimination of the loss ceases. Commitment on the other hand is harder to obtain, but is much less dependent on “the boss” or the "Black Belt".

Commitment arises if ownership is felt. When achieving and maintaining commitment, pleasure plays the decisive role; even an owner should experience pleasure while implementing or continuing to implement improvements! What do we learn from this: if you want to make and continue to make a success of Six Sigma or any other improvement programme, there must be the experience of pleasure! Whatever else, Six Sigma in the Automotive industry must be fun!

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KvK chairman van de Vall

Trade union movement

Business contacts

Automotive Industry