Boff said:
I was told by a former employee of one of the major caravan manufacturers, that they were paid a bonus based entirely on the number of units produced. So they were paid more money if they built 10 units that required complete rebuilds, than if the produced 9 units that had no faults.
I have no way of telling if he was being truthful, and this related to a decade ago. However looking at some of the blatant and obvious faults on new caravans. It is for me a believable state of affairs.
Its called "piece work" and yes its based on quantity not quality, and it has been rife throughout the UK caravan industry for years.
Piece work its self is not always bad, but it should be reserved for simple jobs where operator skill is not required. That does not mean its always wrong to use it for caravan production, but it would require the design of the product and the design of the production environment inherently prevents incorrect assembly. - The caravan industry has a long way to go before they reach that level of product design.
Presently the manufacturers would do better to invest in training their production operatives and to introduce incentives that favour quality over quantity.
Industries where such a change has been made have found that product quality goes up, with fewer after sales issues, and ultimately productivity is not significantly worse and whole life costs including warranty costs drop leading to better profitability. and much less scrap.
The car industry is a prime example of this, but there are other less sizable manufacturers who have also verified the savings to be made by just taking care to do it right first time.
Any caravan company shareholders out there, Im sure would be interested if they could improve their investment dividends by up to 10%, just by changing work force incentives.