Day in the Life at Unilin Insulation

In May, members of the Customer Services and Operations teams across Ireland and the UK took
part in a ‘Day in the Life’. This initiative stemmed from a Warehouse Stock Management CI which focused on standardising our warehouse stock management through stock takes and adjustments, reducing stock errors, thus improving planning and customer service.

DITL was a perspective-gaining exercise to give teams a look behind the curtain of what others do.
Traditionally, a ‘day in the life’ exercise follows one person’s role. Instead, our teams followed a day in the life of an insulation order and how each team interacts with it.

Totalling 231 employee hours, the project allowed participating employees to understand others’ perspective, with the aim of fostering empathy, understanding and appreciation. Teamwork and collaboration have improved following the project as employees learned about other functions, new skills, processes and best practice.

Participants found that observing colleagues’ routines can reveal pain points, bottlenecks, or inefficiencies. Some of the outcomes (delivered via CI) as a bi-product of Day in the Life include:

• CAR to replace barcoding in CHE to aid forklift drivers getting stock movements right
  first time.

• Phenolic line processes and flows being rewritten to increase efficiencies for all. The team observed how reality and process were misaligned, and why the process was not fit for purpose.
  
• Staging SOPs being rewritten with specific scenarios, to support colleagues in fixing bugs or errors they encounter. This will also have a huge benefit for customers as stock accuracy will improve.

A big thank you to all our participants and we are looking forward to hearing more of the outcomes from this exercise.