Building the Foundations for Future Leaders with the Leadership for Manufacturing Excellence Program

The Leadership for Manufacturing Excellence Program (LfME) run by the Geelong Manufacturing Council is supported by the Australian Government Department of Industry, Science, Environment and Resources as part of the Entrepreneurs’ Programme.

Running since 2012 the program has seen over 100 businesses through the course with completed final projects saving businesses on average $300,000 each. It helps coach and train the future generation of manufacturing business leaders.

During the program participants can expect to learn how to:

• Develop their personal leadership skills to engage teams and achieve better results
• Apply Lean concepts in manufacturing during interactive workshops
• Discover strategies to improve team culture and learn how to facilitate their own teams to develop a performance culture in the workplace
• Identify, plan and lead a business improvement project incorporating Lean methodologies and Leadership Program learnings.

The 2020 LfME program ran slightly differently due to the persistent conditions throughout the year with reduced face-to-face numbers and virtual on-site coaching used to facilitate most of the course work. The changes didn’t hamper the results with companies involved seeing excellent results from their final projects.

Although 2020 has been a year of ups and downs the LfME program was able to host the final presentations on December 9^th at the Rydges Conference Centre.

The 2020 Winners

FormFlow: Samaritan house modular unit manufacturing blueprint. Creating a standardised manufacturing process for building modular homes in shorter lead times, increasing capacity and enabling modular homes to be easily built where-ever the location, whoever the builder. Reduced build time from 60 days to 18 days resulting in 300% increase in revenue.

CMTP: Analysed working and break patterns to find solution to improve output by 6%. Changes to break times, implementation of daily scheduling board resulted in increased output of $80-$100k per machine/year.

Boundary Bend: Improved safety and equipment accessibility of the bottling plant’s depalletising area. Simple and quick to implement solutions created an estimated 5% productivity increase.

Coach’s Award

Sectrol: Through introduction and implementation of several techniques learned during the program, the team identified that a number of steps should be taken prior to the decision to purchase new software. Continued 5S, energy audits and gaining owner & management support are consistently being used as continuous improvement tools.

Congratulations to the winners and to each and every one of the participants for this year’s Leadership for Manufacturing Excellence Program for what was an unorthodox year full of challenges and new learnings. TXM will be participating in the 2021 program with a keen interest in helping businesses in the Geelong area.