WHERE
The Sorting Centre is part of the Finnish Red Cross Logistics Centre. The Sorting Centre is located in Joensuu in Eastern Finland, near the Russian border.
The mission of the Logistics Centre is to produce logistics services to support international disaster relief operations. Its main tasks are:
- Equip and store field hospitals/clinics and maintain preparedness to deliver them to disaster areas at a very short notice
- Maintain material storage for disaster relief
- Carry out material procurement and deliveries to relief programmes maintained by the FRC around the world
- Produce good-quality clothing aid and deliver it to those in need around the world
The Sorting Centre sorts donated clothing to international disaster relief and humanitarian aid. The centre employs annually about 50 to 60 long-term unemployed, some of Russian origin, for periods of 6–12 months at a time. It receives and handles over 200,000 kg of donated clothes each year. It sends annually 100,000 kg (10 truckloads) of clothes bales to the Logistics Centre, which is responsible for delivery of Finnish Red Cross aid to international disaster relief.
The Sorting Centre is organised into two departments: sorting (presorting, sorting, packaging and baling) and recycling workshop, which recycles the clothes that are not appropriate for international disaster relief.
The Sorting Centre employs only one person on a permanent basis, the manager. The manager is assisted by 4–6 supervisors hired with the support of state pay subsidy for a maximum period of one year. The supervisors work as heads of the warehouse and workshops and as quality controllers.
WHY
In the Sorting Centre, clothes are sorted into more than 40 different categories according to the International Red Cross directions, such as men’s winter coats, each placed in a rack of their own. Clothes accepted for international aid must be clean, in good condition and sorted into right category. The quality of sorting is even a more important performance criterion than the amount of clothes sorted.
Despite continuous quality control, checks reveal a high number of mistakes in sorting. A key challenge is the constant change of personnel, which is seen, for example, as motivation problems towards the end of the employment. Other challenges are cultural differences and linguistic difficulties. That is why there is a need for efficient methods to maintain the quality at a satisfactory level.
HOW
The quality controllers monitor the quality of clothes sorted into international disaster relief, and train and guide the employees in the sorting department. Each category of clothes has a rack of its own into which the sorted clothes are placed. The quality controllers take a sample of typically 100 items of clothing from each rack in turn. They calculate the number of clothes not meeting the quality criteria and record the deviations into a follow-up table, e.g. the item has been sorted into wrong category or it is torn or dirty. Quality control is also practised in baling of sorted clothes: when the employees place the sorted clothes into bales of 30–40 kg, they remove any items that they consider not meeting the quality requirements.
The most common ways to improve quality in sorting have been short training sessions (30 minutes or less), written instructions and displays of problematic items to sort as examples. Also, when the quality controller finds clear mistakes, these are immediately discussed together with the employees.
In addition to these ways of improving quality, it was decided to test a practice where the employees working in sorting would in their turn act as an ‘assistant quality controller for half a day together with the permanent quality controller. The permanent quality controller will guide the employee to evaluate the quality of sorting of different kinds of pieces of clothing. The employee’s turn as assistant quality controller will be repeated regularly. The idea is to learn to take a more responsible viewpoint to quality and to get more thorough personal guidance from the permanent quality controller.
Experiences
The practice of assistant quality controllers led to a small decrease in total percentage of quality errors (for example from 12% to 8%). The most important result was that the percentage of dirty and torn items has permanently declined to a level of 3 to 4%, which is low enough.
However, some of the employees were negative about their job role change, and this was mentally stressful for the permanent quality controllers. It was decided that the practice would be applied to new employees during the first working week and to those long-time employees who were willing to act as assistant quality controller.
As a means to emphasise quality, the daily percentage of quality errors is marked on a flipboard in the staff coffee room. When the error percentage remains under three, the entire staff are served coffee with buns. Thanks to the efforts to raise quality, the staff members are clearly showing an interest in the development of quality and their motivation to achieve a good result in sorting has increased.
Transferability
This method with the employee shadowing the quality manager (or other expert) can be applied also in other work cultures. Changing the employee’s work role may give them a new insight into the work. They can see their basic work and its results from another perspective.
For more information: Jaana Mäkelä-Peltonen, jaana.makela-peltonen(at)redcross.fi, tel. +358 40 5523953