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Production Engineering
Part XVI
New Workshops Organisation

(By E. T. Spidy, Superintendent of Workshops.)

After months of steady progress the finishing touches are now being given to the Department's comprehensive programme of new workshops construction, and within a comparatively short space of time the transfer of the men and the work to the new buildings will be an accomplished fact.

With this transfer to the new workshops, some further changes in the shops’ organisation become necessary. Some of these changes are due to the concentration of all locomotive work into one set of shops, and of car and wagon work into another set of shops, in each Island.

Each shop (and each department in each shop) in the new workshops will be equipped as completely as possible with the latest tools, machines, and other necessary appliances for carrying out specific operations, each shop thereby becoming a complete unit in itself.

The object of this unification plan is to stop unnecessary delay and handling of the work in hand, or, as I have before stated, “To cut the time between jobs.” When work has to move, the very best moving appliances in the way of cranes, power trucks, etc., will be provided. But when once a job is in a particular department, all the turning, marking, fitting and assembling, etc., will, as far as practicable, be done in that department.

The machine shop departments will contain fitters, turners, machinists and labourers (in whatever proportion is necessary) and the subforeman in charge of a particular machine shop department will be responsible for the output of his department.

In addition to the responsibility for the progress of the work of the department immediately under their control, the various sub-foremen in one shop must submit an individual progress report to the foreman in charge of their shop. The foreman, of course, will be entirely responsible for the collective output and general efficiency of his shop—irrespective of what trades are represented there.

With the object of assisting sub-foremen and foremen to get the best results from their respective departments and shops we are having the costs and accounting methods adjusted (so that each subforeman will get his own departmental costs) and the shop schedules rearranged to conform to the new conditions of work in the different departments.

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