Category: Okategoriserade

The international mobility of employees has a range of benefits to international organizations including a more diverse and flexible team, knowledge sharing, employee engagement and motivation, among many others. This mobility, however, is not something that is as easy as just moving employees around, the organization has a series of responsibilities and support roles to play.

Intercultural competence is one thing that any organization that operates on an international level should be promoting, supporting, teaching and enforcing. Intercultural competence is a term and a concept that includes a wide range of skills that help ensure effective communication and relationships between culturally diverse employees and stakeholders.

Intercultural competence courses are a great way to help your organization maximize international relationships internally and externally. The courses help teach and enforce skills like mindfulness, cognitive flexibility, tolerance for ambiguity, behavioral flexibility and cross-cultural empathy. The courses and training not only help employees understand their peers but empathize and engage with them. The training helps create a culture of sensitivity, inclusiveness and flexibility.

Intercultural competence does not only benefit individuals but also the organization as a whole. Creating this culture of openness will lead to more effective communication thus improving the completion rate of desired goals and transactions. In addition, it will help with employee retention as people feel included, heard and are more easily able to relate to others. Intercultural competence also helps with employee engagement and motivation as they are better equipped to do their jobs successfully and without barriers.

There are different courses within Intercultural competence that range from relocating to working across cultures as well as leadership across cultures and even courses on cross cultural recruitment. Organizations of all sizes and across all industries can largely benefit from intercultural competence courses and training for leaders and operational level employees.

OEE, the abbreviation for Overall Equipment Efficiency, is a term introduced in the sixties to measure the efficiency of the manufacturing process. To put it into simple words, OEE is the measure of the productive manufacturing time. OEE is measured on a scale of 0% to 100% with high score manifesting better OEE, and consequently, productivity.

But from a more profound perspective, OEE is a far more complex concept, incorporating three fundamental dynamics. You will realize that the OEE score is derived from three variables; quality, performance, and availability. These three variables are combined to determine the OEE of manufacturing in this simple formula;

OEE = Availability × Performance × Quality

This formula makes sense in theoretical terms, but when it comes to real manufacturing application, it is condensed to;

OEE = (Good Count × Planned Cycle Time) / Scheduled Production Time

In OEE, the quality score refers to the number of good parts that have been yielded from the manufacturing process. The quality of the manufacturing process takes into account all the losses from defective products, including any that require remanufacturing. Performance, on the other hand, also known as process rate, refers to how fast the equipment has been through manufacturing. This variable takes into account all the slow days and delays as well. Lastly, availability is all about the time the equipment has been scheduled to operate. This metric is derived after considering all the foreseen and unforeseen delays and stops.

Today, managers are very keen on measuring OEE in manufacturing settings. If you want to put efficiency in your manufacturing processes, you need to start monitoring your OEE, for there are three direct benefits of measuring OEE; loss identification, process benchmarking and boosting productivity.

If you are in the manufacturing business and you are not keen on OEE, then you might be losing a lot. Make sure you introduce it soon and monitor the efficiency of processes, improve the existing infrastructure and most importantly, boost productivity to drive in profits!