A visit to Wyma’s Headquarters in Christchurch, New Zealand, is not complete until you have been on a guided tour of the Facility with the likes of Troy McGillicuddy, Workshop Manager. Troy is a wholeheartedly keen advocate for Wyma’s lean enterprise initiative.

Lean at Wyma is ultimately all about creating optimal value for our customers, while at the same time, minimising waste in our internal processes.

Lean is helping Wyma to achieve a better position as a world-class manufacturer and a globally sustainable business. This is good for our customers; strengthening Wyma as an excellent choice of solution provider for our customer’s post-harvest vegetable handling needs. Lean strengthens our time-proven ability to produce quality products and robustly enhances our capability to service our customers’ needs, into the future.

Since embarking on Lean in mid 2007, Wyma has been taking a holistic approach to reducing waste in our manufacturing processes, ultimately striving for our products to reach the customer with optimal quality, and in optimal time. Through Lean, Wyma seeks to minimise any unnecessary or avoidable waste in:
•    Transport (moving of products not actually required to perform the processing)
•    Inventory (all components, work in process and finished product not currently being processed)
•    Motion (people or equipment moving or walking more than required to perform the processing)
•    Waiting (waiting for the next production step)
•    Over-Production (production ahead of demand)
•    Over-Processing (resulting from poor tool or product design creating activity)
•    Defects (the effort involved in inspecting for and fixing defects)

We also strive to provide an environment within Wyma that firstly encourages employees to put forward their improvement ideas and secondly, allows employees to action their ideas, wherever possible.

Wyma is working hard to provide a visual work place with systems and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s), so the manufacturing team can have confidence in completing tasks and producing a quality outcome. The Lean philosophy is about creating a work environment based on trust, honest communication, education and continual improvement.

“We strive to be tough on the problem and easy on the people” says Troy. “The Team respect that and we continue to celebrate the long service of many of our valued employees.”

This is evident by just strolling through the very tidy workshop floor. By having a clean, functional work environment, quality is improved and production times are significantly reduced.

The challenge moving forward is strongly translating the core work that has been done in the manufacturing part of Wyma in recent years – and capitalising on this, through-out the business.

Lean truly is helping us to help our customers.