On Monday January 25th, 12 members of the EPICentre team including past and present incubator members, EPIC Founders participants, and staff were invited to a tour at World Class Manufacturing Academy in Warren, Michigan where they took part in hands-on activities to help them continue to innovate and think outside the box. The purpose for the tour was to explore different training and development techniques used by large corporations to help increase production, efficiency and performance.
The World Class Manufacturing Academy is currently working alongside Chrysler to help improve their company logistics. Since their implementation, Chrysler has seen an increase in company efficiency. Skills such as communication, organization, and collaboration were encouraged in real life scenarios such as grocery shopping and workplace safety, bringing in fun training techniques and an out of the class teaching style to drive the lesson home.
To start off the day, participants were split into two teams to identify workplace safety hazards in a team building workshop. They then compared their results to see the contrasting answers they got in order to show that everyone thinks differently, and that teamwork fosters better results than working individually. The next workshop emphasized efficiency, showing participants that placement of tools and available resources can have an impact in production. This was done through a friendly game of Operation. Two participants were pitted against each other in two different scenarios to see who could complete the game with the fastest time. A task in an unorganized work space in addition to unclear instructions took 4x longer to complete, in comparison to an organized workplace with a clearly laid out plan.
The tour concluded with a modified activity adapted from the popular game show Super Market Sweep, putting into place the concept of how everyday activities like grocery shopping can be improved with a clear goal in mind and an organized list.
For more information about the academy, please visit: http://www.uaw-chrysler.com/about-ntc/
