The importance of a decision

By Martina Zomborská | Cloetta Slovakia

All of us have experienced the negative impact of COVID-19 pandemic on our businesses. During the initial phase of the pandemic, we had to decide how to utilize our people when line loads dropped dramatically. Lay them off? Keep them? What will happen to all the projects we planned in our operational plan? What impact will it have on our business results?

The decision we made was to keep our employees and find meaningful activities for them which will help the business.

One of the activities we implemented was to accelerate OEE (overall equipment efficiency) improvements projects on multiple lines. No magic - just a step-by-step approach and a focus which included a review of production schedules and the creation of production blocks to free-up lines for thorough maintenance activities - Total Clean Out (TCO). We trained operators in this methodology and tools and set up a control system to sustain the improvements.

In this way, we were able to alter the unfavourable situation as regards the COVID-19 pandemic, which we are not able to control, into a significant improvement of OEE. There are 39 production lines at Levice, and on 30 we have improved OEE. This resulted in the best ever OEE at the Levice factory, which was also supported by the best ever technical availability of lines.

Hand-in-hand with the decision not to release any employees was the question of their protection. How could we ensure a safe work environment for our people and protect them and their families from COVID-19 infection?

As one of the first factories in the region, we decided to test all our employees weekly, including family members. We are glad to say that the results show zero positives for a number of weeks.

We are very happy that the testing fulfilled the main goal: protection of our employees and their families, which ensured production continuity. It also had a secondary effect, which we hadn’t counted with – very good PR for our factory!