Before a carmaker gives South Africa its next model, it looks at how our plants run on a Monday morning

By Merel van der Lei, CEO of Wyzetalk

It’s ten past six on a Monday morning at an auto plant in Gqeberha, and a team leader is staring at two empty stations. One operator’s taxi hasn’t come, and the other is off sick. Someone on the next line has done this job before, but he has no idea who, so he starts phoning around while the line crawls.

Nobody reports on that half-hour, exactly, but the impact of it happening still ends up in a spreadsheet at a head office in Europe or Japan, right next to the figures from plants in Asia and South America all bidding on manufacturing the next car model. In no small way, South African plants win or lose those contests on mornings exactly like this one. Economically speaking, we really can’t afford to lose many.

Vehicle exports dropped 18,8% in September to 31 473 units, according to naamsa. Our plants ship about two-thirds of what they build, mostly to the EU and UK, Reuters reported last month, and Nissan stopped building vehicles here this year after its plant ran below capacity. Ford Africa’s president, Neale Hill, called the fight for investment “a competition between countries within Ford Motor Company”. I’d bet every group with a plant here sees it in a similar way, and 113 000 direct jobs hang on how we do.

At the same time a lot is in the process of changing in the local sector, and a large amount of it is directly relevant to the actual people on assembly lines. A lot of news is coming, and how fast that news travels is going to be increasingly essential.

One in 20 new vehicles sold here this year is electrified, and plug-in hybrid sales passed double last year’s total with four months still to go. Ford already builds a plug-in hybrid Ranger locally. Each new variant brings extra assembly steps and high-voltage safety rules, and the operator who missed the briefing is where the defect, or the injury, comes from.

Car plants measure almost everything to the second. But what is generally not seen on one of the tracking boards is how long a corrected work instruction takes to reach the last operator it affects. I’d call that number time-to-floor. On many South African lines it runs to days, because the correction still travels by word of mouth at the start of a shift, to whoever happens to be standing there. People on leave, on nights or on another rotation pick it up second-hand, if at all. So the same fault turns up next week, made by someone who never saw the fix.

The industry’s own playbook explains why this matters. Toyota built its production system on two ideas: any operator can pull the andon cord and stop the line, and every job follows a written standard. The andon cord gets information up the line in seconds. Standard work only helps if each operator holds the current version, and on a plant floor that speaks isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English and isiZulu across three shifts, the current version spreads slowly.

IATF 16949, the quality standard most carmakers expect from their plants and suppliers, asks for evidence that employees are competent in their tasks and aware of how their work affects quality. South Africa’s Occupational Health and Safety Act obliges employers to inform employees of the hazards in their work and the precautions they need to take. A signed toolbox-talk register shows who stood in the room on Tuesday morning, but it can’t show whether the night shift knows the new rule for a high-voltage harness.

Plants that cut time-to-floor treat information as part of the line’s equipment. A change goes to each affected operator individually, in their own language, and the supervisor gets a confirmation that it landed and was understood. Over a few months those confirmations add up to something plants rarely have: a current record of who can do which job, by name and by station. That’s what our team leader in Gqeberha from earlier needed at ten past six.

Plenty of people are talking about what government must do to keep South Africa on carmakers’ shortlists. I’d like to hear one plant manager say how long it takes a decision made in the boardroom to reach the operator at station 14. Plants that can answer in hours will have a strong story to tell the next time head office compares them with a plant in Asia.