Placed Mutual to Our Benefit

RANK XEROX The house magazine of Rank Xerox Mitcheldean A group of our industrial placement students, now working in departments throughout the site. of Dean College backed up by work experience on site which will lead to a BTeC national certificate," said Brian Fowler, manager, skills and functional training. At a lower age level we have once again taken on school and college leavers as engineering technician apprentices — two of them girls. Having had two weeks' induction at the plant they are now studying for an EITB first year certificate at the RFDC. Apart from our existing 'work experience' scheme for secondary school pupils, a new initiative we have been involved in this year is Project '92. Funded by the Training Agency and administered by Gloucestershire Local in finance, were IPs at Welwyn Education Authority, who are and Aylesbury respectively. leaders in this field, it aims to Placed to our On the internal give young people going into development front, we are also higher education a wider continuing to train electrical experience of the working mutual benefit trainees for FR&T positions. world, including a period of "They are following a two- industrial placement in OUR INDUSTRIAL news spreads. year course, with study one Europe. placement scheme is a "We keep in touch with day a week at the Royal Forest Ctmtiimed overleaf continuing success story. them and aim to give them an It was introduced four indication as to whether we Engineering technician apprentices (from left) Stephen Winney. Claire Owen. Alan Mini hill. Claire Phelps. Barry Davies and Simon Young. years ago, since when the can provide employment, number of students accepted depending on satisfactory from colleges and examination results. polytechnics has steadily "We now look upon the increased from the original scheme as a valuable source of nine. recruits." "We are getting a high You may well recognise calibre of student some of the young people who demonstrating interest in a have recently started work at career in Rank Xerox," human Mitcheldean as having been resources manager Robin among the 1989 intake of IPs. Fyffe reports, "and we are We have also offered now sponsoring more IPs employment to graduates through their final year. whose industrial placement "They return to college was at other Rank Xerox after their year's placement locations — Andrea Brashko, with us and talk about it to who has joined the purchasing other students and the good team, and David Howell, now Continued Participating in the pilot scheme is A-level student Bryan's winning way wit It Samantha Green, whose parents, incidentally, are ex- RX employees. words F ^ She spent four weeks in purchasing last August, BRYAN LEONARD of QA tends working in the newly set up to be a man of few words. 'vendor and cost But when it came to the recent development' section Quality Breakout Competition he managed by Dave Partridge. proved himself a real wordsmith. He gave her some His prize performance won responsible work to do, not him a five-day return ticket for just run-of-the-mill tasks, an two plus car on any one of P&O appreciative Sam told us. European Ferries eight routes to the Continent or Northern Ireland She developed a user — worth up to £186. manual for the material The competition, aimed at productivity system and input Bryan Leonard niili Ins Super Frize', presented to him by MOC manager Danny increasing awareness of our data to enaljle reporting of Haines: on the right is John Richardson. Quality Breakout strategy, cost variances. She also involved constructing as many 'equatorial', and he came up with carried out financial analysis might think, because there are 14 words of four letters or more as more words starting with the different letters which don't of purchased hardware on possible from "Quality Breakout'. letter 'b' than the total number of appear in 'Quality Breakout' af current products. Brian Cooke, a colleague in some other entries. all, so I could skip whole Over the past year we have parts manufacturing, was It was the first competition he sections." extended our links with originally a front runner, but he has ever entered and he did it This is certainly a 'red letter schools to an even younger was pipped at the post by Bryan because, as he says, he found it an year' for Bryan who reached his age through the Rank Xerox who submitted no less than 561 interesting challenge. 25-year service milestone last Primary Schools Industry words! "I decided I would have to March. Project. Using the Concise Oxford work to a system, so I went He started work in the The venture, begun last English Dictionary, John through my rather out-of-date machine shop as an inspector and June, has been continuing with Richardson of quality Collins Dictionary from A to Z has remained in parts visits from both teachers and management, who devised and doing one letter a night. I found manufacturing QA ever since. pupils with a view to giving judged the competition, whittled words I had never heard of — it Now a leading hand, he carries children a better that number down to 397 as valid certainly increased my out final inspection of parts, understanding of the world of according to the rules. vocabulary," says Bryan. mainly fuser/pressure rolls. work, and help in delivering Bryan's longest word was "It wasn't as laborious as you aspects of the national curriculum. Who knows — some time A very successful workshop in the future we may have employees who have maintained contact with us through all stages of their education, right from primary school, through work experience, commercial or engineering training, industrial placement and sponsorship at university or college! The delegates to the Multinational Quality Workshop. Communication A FOLLOW-UP to an earlier one up to meet demand. placement student Mujib held in Webster a year ago, a Areas particularly highlighted Choudhury. courses Multinational Quality Workshop during the workshop concerned Neill reports that the workshop was held at Mitcheldean from 16 design and engineering related proved highly successful in THIS AUTUMN we are involved to 18 July. matters, manufacturing, input and defining root causes of problems in the holding of a •Communication Skills in The Rank Xerox and Xerox output devices, CRU and and action plans, and also on a Technology" workshop for delegates represented a wide developer housing. personal level, engendering a teachers, along with the GCHQ spectrum of functions — design Parts mis-assembly and labels close rapport between people and the BBC. and production engineering, new were among the manufacturing whose normal contact is by Being held at Hathcrley Manor build and recycling operations, problems dealt with and Brian electronic mail or telephone. Hotel. Gloucester, on 11 and 12 developer housing manufacture, Hopkins (QA) and Charlie Bruton Excellent teamwork was October, it relates to the national marketing, customer service and (assembly operator) helped with displayed throughout the curriculum key stages 1 to 4. quality assurance. the input of information at a sub• workshop and during a social We shall be covering The objectives were to share group meeting. evening held in the clubhouse on 'Communication in Emergencies': communication systems for key information and process issues QA manager Brian Reeves the second day. when a stages 1 and 2 — preventing or related to end user customer welcomed the delegates and did manufacturing side took on an dealing with accidents and satisfaction performance for the the introductions, and Neill Bates engineering side at skittles, pool emergencies linked to the fire 5018/5028/5034 product family (small copier QA section and darts, the engineers achieving department. which, incidentally, is going so manager) acted as Mitcheldean a narrow victory (18-6!) overall. well that a third line has been set facilitator along with industrial They're hot on the trail of Operations support manager Jane Meek anil (riglitl Ruth the trailers Patterson (industrial placement}, m'o members of the trailer "IT LOOKED like a mountain of problem," Grahain told us, reduction team. work to start with." said Ruth ""whereas loaded trailers have a Patterson (an appropriate dual ownership." comment from a student of the For some time transport had Polytechnic of Wales!). been operating a trailer And certainly if the average management system which kept number of trailers parked on and track of the trailers, and Lyndon off- site were to have been piled issued reports from the system to up in one heap, they would have departments concerned. reached mountainous proportions. They were costing us thousands of pounds in rental and off-site hire costs as well as Transport section manager Graham Jones watches as Lyndon Phillips logs causing congestion on site. the arrival of a trailer into the The first objective of an management system. AdelkiT project, initiated by a materials logistic team consisting recycling operations, for example, of Jane Meek (operations within five months the number of support). Ruth Patterson trailers per month was reduced (industrial placement), and from 37 to nine, with an average Graham Jones and Lyndon cost saving per month of close on Phillips (transport), was to £20.000. establish the optimum number of The target the team set was to trailers required to maintain our reduce the average of 157 trailers production lines. to 85. In fact, they got the number A simplified trailer process down to 71 by last July and the was developed by the team which project is continuing to reduce it showed up the wastage between But although the data was implications. further, with a four-day maximum the actual and the theoretical time there, it needed to be extracted As part of this trailer reduction loading time being planned.

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