Here are 5 ways you can manage your manufacturing activities amid COVID clallanges.

Work from home is not possible for core manufacturing employees e.g. assembly, inspection, machining, process industries, packaging etc. Whereas manufacturing companies add maximum value through these direct shop floor employees. How do you manage to keep manufacturing running in Covid situations. Here are 5 tips collected by talking to various leading manufacturing companies. 

1 Divide work in shifts 

• You can divide your workforce to work in different shifts. e.g. 50% of the core manufacturing workforce comes in one shift, and 50% in another shift (if you have two shifts or 33% in each if you have 3 shifts). This will help you to maintain social distancing and also reduce chances of infection.
• Do not have overlap employees during shift changeover. This will help reduce the spread of unwanted infections.

2 Use Bio-Secure Bubble concept

• Many sports events are organized through biosecure bubble concepts including IPL. A bio secure bubble is a safe and secure environment. It is isolated from the outside world to minimize risk of Covid-19 infection. Only authorized sports persons, support staff and match officials are permitted to enter the protected area. 
• If you have a colony, guest house near to your manufacturing facility, you can also plan bio secure bubbles and plan your production accordingly. In order to manage you can further divide your employees into different bio secure groups.  

3 Covid reality check in Gemba meeting (Daily Morning Meeting)

• In daily Gemba meetings, understand the status of covid infections in your employee’s neighbourhood, relatives and family members and track it. If you foresee any risk, you can inform an employee to take paid leaves and stay at home. This way you can avoid probable risk of infection within the factory. 
• Get RT-PCR of your employees done every 15 days to know any sort of infection.

4 Keep isolation ward within factory

• Most of the organizations have proper processes to check and prevent infections. However, by any chance if you find that an employee has some symptom, you can transfer him / her to an isolation ward in the factory first. Then you can shift to a suitable healthcare facility. 
• Your isolation facility shall have suitable healthcare facilities including but not limited to oxygen concentrator machines. You can convert unused meeting rooms for this.

5 Managing canteen 

• In Spite of following many regulations, companies forget to manage canteens where employees gather. Stagger timing of lunch in the canteen so that it is possible to manage Use staggered timing for the canteen. Change your canteen seating arrangements so that it is possible to maintain social distancing.

Concept Business Excellence Private Limited is a leading consulting and training company. We believe each organization has a “Hidden Gold Mine” of opportunities to optimize profits and improve efficiency and effectiveness of business. We help organizations to uncover this “Hidden Gold Mine” through 

• Process / operation improvement 
• People Development