Apprentices learn to be lean

Last week, 35 of our new apprentices visited the Bosch Rexroth Lean Factory.

Bosch Rexroth travel around the country with their Lean Factory giving workshops to engineers and manufacturers.

Last week it was based at one of the AMRCs buildings for 4 days and Bosch Rexroth agreed to let our apprentices attend a workshop free of charge.

The purpose of the day was to get our apprentices considering how to eliminate waste within the workplace.

The session started with a 30-minute presentation about waste and lean principles, with the apprentices then splitting into 3 teams to complete a challenge.

The challenge was to build a Lego plane from sight in a set time. All the teams were unable to complete the challenge, with them all unsure of what stage to do first and disagreeing with each other.

The teams were then asked to build the plane using set modules and processes. The purpose of this was to get the apprentices to consider how working in modules and following processes can enable us to complete jobs quicker and help us to guarantee quality.

The next part of the day involved the teams of apprentices competing against each other on a fully automated production line. They had just 3 minutes to complete 2 full assemblies. The challenge was all about the apprentices learning to look at ways to improve things, how they can eliminate waste in a process, and also highlight how easy it is for things to get mixed up.

One of our apprentices, Matthew Williams, walked away with a prize for his innovation and ideas, – a Bosch cordless screwdriver. Matthew, who is employed by the AMRCs Integrated Manufacturing Group, said ‘The day was generally fun and interesting and something different from everything we've done so far. I've never seen a production line in action either, so it was good to see that.

Josh Parkin, an apprentice at Chesterfield Special Cylinders also attended the session. He thought the day was very hands-on and gave the apprentices a small insight into how factories run.

Jon Radford, AMRC Training Centre trainer, said ‘The apprentices got a lot out of the session. It opened their minds of what to look out for when they go back to their workplaces. The session was brilliantly run and I'd definitely love the opportunity to take more apprentices in the future.