About 20 years ago, the factory that I worked in decided to implement a major change in the production system.
The change was triggered by dwindling customer orders coupled with a growing number of new product models that we needed to test run.
The trusted conveyor belt production lines could not cope with the small orders for a large number of product models as they were designed to produce large volumes of a single product model over a given period.
Due to their length and pitch time, long conveyor belt production lines take a long time to change product models.
If each product model change required 15 minutes, five product model changes in a day would cause 75 minutes or more accurately 4,500 seconds of lost time.
Multiply that with 30 production operators then we get a whopping 135,000 man-seconds to recover.
If we had 10 production lines with similar time losses then the total becomes 1.35 million man-seconds, a figure that would be impossible to recover without doing staggering overtime work.
A standard was drawn up based on projected time losses due to product model change requirements for small orders.
Products that incur huge time losses would not be run on conveyor belt production lines and would be produced using small production stations instead.
The small production stations only had four or five operators, each completing two or more stages of assembly before passing the semi-finished product to the next point of assembly.
The small production stations were not exactly popular with the operators as they had a big drawback — the operators would have to do their work while standing, as opposed to sitting down at the conveyor belt.
Some of the more vocal senior operators even questioned the legality of asking them to stand for hours at a stretch.
However, all their questions were answered by the standard operating procedure that had been prepared before the implementation of the new system.
They understood the situation and why the change in production set up was needed. Of course there were still a few who resisted the change but it was not for lack of information, and they were the exception rather than the rule.
It was a tough time. But it didn’t matter how tough the situation was — the production supervisors and executives never blamed or put down their subordinates because management upholds the principle that “if the operators don’t know, it means the supervisors never taught them properly”. Putting down your subordinates will only expose your weak management skills.
The above events came flooding back to me after seeing some similarities with the brouhaha about the proposed merger between Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) and Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA).
Numerous people have written about it, from industry giants to ministers and academicians, presenting their arguments on the merits and pitfalls, the pros and cons. As the proposed merger has suddenly become almost a sure thing in a flurry of workshops by the Higher Education Department (HED) and press statements featuring big words like kebitaraan, the voices appealing for the Education Ministry and the government as a whole to rethink their decision also grew in number and force.
Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik issued a few statements on the issue, among others claiming the opposition had sabotaged the merger plans by leaking parts of the details, UMT had performed poorly and had strayed from its marine and maritime main thrusts. Members of the media had tried to get further details of the merger plans but to no avail.
The HED and the ministry were unable to give further details other than the fact that the decision had been made collectively by the cabinet and that there were prospects of better achievements by the new university.
The lack of details raised the question of what standards were used to judge that any two universities should be merged, or what sort of performance markers should be exceeded (or not achieved) in order for a university to lose its independence.
If there were such standards being referred to before the cabinet arrived at the decision to merge UMT and UniSZA, then why can’t anyone give the details?
Shouldn’t the standard be made known to all universities so that they can ensure their performance does not fall into the “ripe to be merged” category?
If there were no standards of reference, then how did the cabinet arrive at such a decision?
To quote management and quality control pioneer Joseph M. Juran: “Without a standard there is no logical basis for making a decision or taking action”.
Universities in Malaysia are governed by the Universities and University Colleges Act 1971 (AUKU 1971) and nothing about merging universities was mentioned in it, even in its latest amendment last year.
Neither is there any specific mention against mergers but considering that it has never happened before, shouldn’t such an important deviation from the norm be included in AUKU 1971 through an amendment?
Setting a precedence of overhauling the current system without going through Parliament is dangerous.
The writer is an independent journalist based in Terengganu