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The Government sponsored STAL-Project is finalized and among other important items it clearly revealed, based on the STAL-Project participating 35 companies “Productivity” is lacking far  behind. With low productivity we always need more staff, our work gets more costly, what ever we do is more difficult and complex to manage, to lead, to control and to coach. As a result we are getting not more but less competitive. What we can see: “Productivity” is key to domestic and international Competitiveness. 

Yet, the STAL-Project also shows that the degree to which human resource thinking and activities contribute to process, workflow, organizational and manufacturing effectiveness in Textile / Garment is vastly underestimated. And there are three principal reasons:

 

1. Textile / Garment is still thinking that working “hard” is the “productivity” answer. But well, it is not. Working hard is meant to be very busy. Being busy however makes us loose sight of important priorities as we work hard when we should be working smart. Working smart means getting the same results in less time. To do that, we must change how we work. We will get the most by changing our focus and direction and organizing ourselves to do things in parallel. Parallel in a team instead of doing things individually and alone. Team Approach, the STAL-Project is showing, is urgently required! 

2. The biggest problem however arrives as we have been educated and accustomed to become “all-rounder”. Multitasking is fine, yes, but it is only “fine” however not the answer for “Enhancement of Productivity”. In many studies and research work it has been shown that staff is less productive when “multitasking”. Of course we feel particularly busy when multitasking, when being engaged in scheduling the machine, controlling quality, instruct staff, chase material and ask the customer what he really wants, all at the same time. So, yes, we are very busy.  But in fact most of that busy-ness is spent switching from task to task, but not making real progress on any one task and not gaining any more competencies on the individual character of such multitasking approach. Distributed responsibility and distributed competencies do not make up for focused responsibility and focused competencies. But the latter ones are required ! 

3. Another way to work smarter is by making a difference between busy and productive. There is a big difference between feeling busy and productive. We are only productive when we are producing, achieving, generating the results that are most important to make the customer, the job, the work we do and the company we are in “move forward”. The 80/20 rule says that 80 percent of our results should arrive from just 20 percent of our efforts. If you double the time you spend on real-output-producing activities arriving at 40% and stop doing the others, you'll double your output and spend 60 percent less time! That is why we do not have a “more staff requiring problem”, we have a vast “Productivity Problem” ! 

The results of the STAL-Project are proving that it is the way we work which lets us hamper in so urgently required “Productivity”. Our presently horizontally designed step by step and un-integrated workflows are organizational tools of the past and are hindering to-day’s progress in productivity and competitiveness. Companies in Textile / Garment need to change the way they operate to a vertically integrated business and manufacturing process supported by (professional) team approaches and cross-functional cluster build up. The demand is for internal and external clustering. All that is the important message learned out of the STAL-Project. 

Pls contact us for any further information you might need for any support you might like to have in redesigning your operation for upgraded productivity and competitiveness.