Newspapers / Firestone News (Gastonia, N.C.) / Oct. 1, 1992, edition 1 / Page 2
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department news twisting By: Richard Harrison As we approach the end of another year, it is a good time to look back and reflect our successes and failures. Great improvements have been accomplished in areas of waste and spools of bad work. Waste in twisting has been reduced from .70% to less than .40%. Spools of bad work have been reduced from better than 600 spools per day to less than 420 spools per day. Records have been set in areas of productivity as the plant has surpassed 50 Ibs./manhour production. Housekeeping through the efforts of our teams and employee involvement has shown great improvement. Twisting has experienced twelve accidents recently. We need to work on safety habits. Absenteeism continues to exceed an expectable level of above 6%. Let's improve in these important areas. As we approach transition to the new plant, we must be prepared to accept the many challenges that wa face. We must complete our current overhauling schedule as well as additional twisters next year. Plans are to replace single feed rollers on 25 twisters on the 2nd East End with double feed rollers. New rings and spindles will be installed on 45 twisters on the 4th floor. New rings and spindles will be installed on 44 twisters on the 2nd West End. You can see that we have an aggressive schedule for next year. Thanks to everyone for the support in housekeeping for our most recent plant visit with MR.YOKAHAMA. Our areas looked fantastic. Hopefully we can gain additional business from this visit. WEAVING By; Mike Roland Changes are taking place in Weaving now that we are entering our transition phase for the new plant. Thanks to all of you for efforts made to hold our safety, quality and production up to acceptable standards. More changes will take place as we get further down the road. WEAVING CONTINTraiD. . . Two additional Draper air jet looms have been purchased for 1992 and one more Dornier loom. It is proposed that by the time we move to our new plant we will have all Draper air jet looms for tire cord. It is exciting seeing Bridgestone/Firestone making this investment in our future. QUALITY By; Dave Lewis I cannot say strongly enough how important it is that we make some long strides toward improving our quality. Oh, I know, we do a "pretty good" job. It is true that almost everything we do is "in spec". Yes, most of our mistakes are just in one or two yards of fabric and the other 1200 yards are right. I understand, really I do. But customers do not. They pay our wages, and they pay for 100% in specification! We are not delivering 100% in specification. Our friends down in South America sent us a bill for $14,000 because we didn't give them good fabric last month. And this is not unusual. We get a bill like this fevery month, month after month. And this is less than half the total refunds we pay each month. We are producing the best fabric Gastonia has ever made in its history, and it is not good enough. We need to do better. Oh, we don't need to make any big change in the way we work, and we don't need to invest millions of dollars. We each need to do our job properly, according to the written procedures, and do it properly every minute of every day we are on the job. We need to be alert to any quality problems that come up, and we need to take the action that promotes better quality. WEST END COMMENTS By: Jeff Heavner Orders for Industrial Fabric have increased to the point that all West End looms are full, including the new one due in-house in December. Increase in business includes some new customers which help us diversify our customer base. The West End has begun recycling its rapiers which will save money. We have identified an alternative supplier for some of the other loom
Firestone News (Gastonia, N.C.)
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Oct. 1, 1992, edition 1
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