Pooling ideas in Everswinkel and in Bremen

I deal with planned maintenance work or repairs in production. Each day, people from production, shift managers and plant maintenance all come together for our shop-floor meetings and look at our pinboard. We start off by talking about work safety and any possible dangers. Then the machine operators discuss the machine performance the day before. We analyze the main problems and teams from the workshop and production evaluate them together. We determine how to deal with any faults and schedule that work. It’s good to talk with everyone there because they all share their points of view. The meetings also really showed how it’s productive and helpful if we address difficulties all together, involving people from different departments. What I really liked is that we talk openly about problems. It wasn’t like in the past, where sometimes, it was about blaming people. We’re really working as a team now.“

The market for infant nutrition is one of the most promising markets for consumer goods. In Germany, with the Humana and Alete brands, we know that we’re pretty well-placed at Humana sales. Exchanging ideas within the DMK team and bundling our skills makes us strong, compared to our rivals and will help us overcome our challenges. That means we have to work well together as a team and as a Unit.

As team coordinator, I moderated the shop-floor meeting. In Everswinkel, it involved employees from very different areas. We talked mainly about machine performance and faults, and then we focused on the most serious issue. The main problem was with the carton folder - the outer boxes weren’t being closed properly. That’s a serious issue because later, it can cause problems in the process of putting everything on pallets and also potentially lead to complaints from customers. Meeting as a team allowed us to focus on the problem and address it methodi- cally. We had orderly, useful exchanges, even though people approached things from a whole range of perspectives. Working together like that brings the huge advantage that you don’t have to figure out how to solve a problem on your own, but benefit from many different viewpoints.