Lima Tire Plant Company Case
Going through the case of Lima Tire Plant Company, I realized that this company is having severe issues with their company structure. The most important problem is the 12- hours working period per shift. Due to the long 12-hours shifts, an amount of direct issues could be made. Workers could come in late, be late of returning from break, and some workers even call in sick. These circumstances make foreman no choice but to spontaneously assign other substitute workers to replace the positions that are blank. Eventually the problems seem to be solved, but actually they are not. In fact, in the process of assigning people could waste a lot of time of both foreman and the other workers who have already worked in the line, in the way that they need to wait for and explain what they are doing to substitute workers. In order to avoid this inefficiency and counter-productivity, I suggest shortening the 12-hours to 8-hours, so that 3 shifts per day, and each shifts get same salary. According to the Sample Exit Interview, it shows that a line foreman is satisfied with both his salary and benefits, but on the contrary, he is not happy with the work hours. Therefore, a good way of keeping employees satisfied with everything is offering the same hourly wage, but shorter shift time. As a result, workers are more motivated to work efficient, persistence, and with citizenship behavior would be the best.
The other aspect that Lima could improve is hiring more people for assisting the foreman, in order to share responsibility for simple tasks. As mentioned in the case that Wall has an idea of hiring new college graduates, as lifting the percentage of 16% in December 2006 to 30%. New college graduates could bring a lot of benefits to the company. Most are willing to work for significantly less salary than “experienced hires”, also they are self-motivated continuous learners, because they have a recent history of learning. Moreover, new graduates are longing to use