Casa Sauza in search of "Excellence in Agriculture"

As a specialist in Learning and in the Development of Agriculture, as well as in the Training and Education Pillar of the TPM methodology, I have spoken in previous blogs about the challenge that the implementation of this methodology meant, as well as of the skills transference that we carried out ever since we started applying TPM in the agriculture activities at Casa Sauza.

In this blog I will talk about the first goal that we've achieved: Moving to the next stage, Pre-Audit for the Excellence Award.

Health Check

In October 2016, the first evaluation event called Health Check was held, at which an auditor evaluated the condition of the methodology's implementation and gave us feedback on it. Unfortunately, in that year, we were not considered able to continue to the next stage.

So we decided we should work during another year in strengthening all of the weaknesses that we had and came up in the evaluation, so we could come back to the following year's Health Check event.

Steps to Prepare Ourselves

Some of the activities that we carried out in order to prepare ourselves and overcome this step, always supported by the Training and Education pillar, were:

1. The steps of the Autonomous Maintenance Pillar were reinforced and a kick-off training was carried out for all of our staff, from the manager to the operators, with theory and practice courses.
2. We also worked on the Planned Maintenance Pillar steps and carried out a kick-off training course for all of our staff, once again, from the manager to the operators, both in theory and practice.
3. Training was carried out on the Focused Improvement Pillar as well, by means of a kick-off course, which trained our staff on the 10 steps methodology in order to implement it in cases of improvement.
4. Training was carried out on how to assemble the Autonomous Maintenance boards in one of the warehouses that we chose for a pilot test.

It is worth mentioning that each the other pillars that are necessary for the implementation of the TPM methodology were also working on their own in order to reinforce the weaknesses that were detected in them during the 2016 evaluation.

Getting Ready for the Next Health Check

After carrying out all of these preparatory activities, our next step was to get ready for the Health Check audit, which would be held at the beginning of October 2017.

So everything that we had learned in the before-mentioned training sessions was put into practice, and we worked on preparing one of the 7 agave production zones. The Jalapa de Cánovas warehouse, in Guanajuato, was chose the pilot-test warehouse for this evaluation.

I would like to highlight the efforts made by the leader of the area, as well as by all of his collaborators, since their commitment and dedication to this evaluation added a lot of value to the team, from the operations management to the pillars involved in this TPM methodology.

The result of this audit was successful and we were allowed to advance to the next stage, the pre-audit for the Excellence award. We made it to this stage thanks to the effort done by the whole team. We also detected some weaknesses in which we will keep working so that, in 2018 evaluation, we get the approval to continue to the last stage, the final audit. If we are successful during that audit, we will then be awarded with the TPM Excellence Award.

What's next?

Once we achieve that goal, we do not want to stay there, we want to still move forward and reach the categories that follow this one: Consistency, Special and World Class, so we can be acknowledged as a World Class Company in Agriculture Activities.

You can always come and visit Casa Sauza yourself so you can learn on-site from our improvement experiences. We would love to share our information with you!