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A Quality Experience - Part 2

What happened next?

While most shoe manufacturing in Britain has collapsed, Church's has been expanding, first by buying production facilities and then by buying and growing a network of shoe shops to sell its products.

Its success has a lot to do with the power of its brand, synonymous with high-quality black brogues worn by Englishmen (close examination of the latest James Bond film reveals a pair on the feet of 007 actor Pierce Brosnan). The company has also attacked its labour costs. It has discarded the linear approach to making shoes. Instead, workers operate in teams of four or five in a roughly horse-shoe shaped arrangement of machine tools. There are more machines than people and each team member knows how to operate all of the machines, doing what is necessary to get the batches through the process.

According to John Church, the results have been extraordinary in the areas where teamwork has been introduced. Production time has been slashed from seven weeks to about a month, saving Church's about 5% of the cost of every shoe. "We were a bit apprehensive about introducing teamworking , and we took our time about it, but the results have been really encouraging," says Church's managing director. The company now intends to roll out the system to all parts of the production line dealing with the higher volume products.

The changes were gradual and indeed, the whole shape of the company has an unfashionable air about it, at least from the management guru's perspective. It owns old plants in high-wage areas, and persists in owning a retail network of over 100 shoe shops in the UK and a far-flung network of overseas outlets. "It works", counters Church.

In the last two years it certainly has. The recently announced 1996 results saw profits up by 18%. The headline figures, however, concealed stronger progress. Last year the company's net cash flow was £9 million, which paid off another £4m of debt and allowed the company to buy £2m worth of equipment last year. One of those recent purchases is a hideously complicated machine tool that uses an octopus-like embrace of metal rods to pull the leather upper of the shoe over its last to shape it. What differentiates it from a grimier looking machine to its right which is doing the same thing is the computer monitor which asks the operator to tap in what kind of shoe needs to be shaped and does the shaping automatically. It cost £50 000 and they will be getting another soon - "if the accountants will let us". These machines will speed things up and reduce human errors, and with luck pay for themselves within five years.

Source: Independent on Sunday 13.4.1997

Your task........

Compare the actual changes made at Church's with those you suggested earlier. What do you think will happen to Church's in the future?

Part 1 | Part 2