Hi All,
Rather than the customary end of year newsletter that people write this year I thought I would break the mold and send out a “welcome to the New Year” letter instead to review the last year and update on our plans for 2023.
Last year we did quite some analysis on our strengths and weaknesses, based on feedback from you all, and also internal feedback from our staff, we know we have been not as strong as we should be, or could be with getting good information back to customers in a timely manner, and have also been slow with development work and pricing. We have looked at these issues closely and also in light of our sales growing and have been reviewing how to manage a larger load, faster and more efficiently. There have been some really great descussions around this, and the upshot from this is basically a full redesigning of our factory layout, including adding on some floorspace, and some changes to the way manage and administer our production. Interestingly with grow it was the administration of additional work that became the main internal issue for us.
After many scratchings and scribblings we finally came up with a blueprint for an improved factory layout to improve our work flow and communincations, we started work on this in May 2022 and I was hopoing we would be done by the end of 2022, but we are not! Its has grown into a larger and more multi-faceted project as we have gone along, but we are all very happy to take a little longer, if it means we can do more work easier and provide a better and faster service to you all, and that is what we are doing, its very exciting to see it take shape and to already see the impact it is going to have on Kapit Mas. I won’t nbore you with all the details here, but I do look forward – now that COVID restrictions are lessening – to welcome you to come and see for yourselves the new Kapit Mas.
There are a few things I would like to mention now though that we are doing however, that are important.
Firstly after an extensive review of rejected items – We are very happy BTW of the low rates of rejection we are getting – but we noticed that most of our rejectiions came from process issues rather than product issues, and we could see that the way we aere doing our QC – by inspecting items in a QC Dept. after each process was completed was failing to catch these issues as they happened, and for some, for example incorrect gluing or bead stringing it was difficult to QC the problem after the process was completed. SO t correct this we are shifting our focus more to a Quality Assurance base rather than post process QC and with this approach a QC/QA officer will be appointed to a specific sub-area and will supervise the work as it occurs to ensure the process is carried out correctly, and only items of the correct quality can pass from that production process to another.
Another area in which we are responding to your requirements is with gold production. We have seen a lot more enquiries coming in for gold production lately, and as we were effectively trying to produce gold jewellery in a silver factory, Mixing the 2 does not work well, and limited what we could do, We have set up a new dedicated gold facility which is up and running as of December 2022, and the results are good, so please think of us for any gold work you have. Certified recycled gold is available on request.
Last year we were nominated by the local Social Welfare and workforce Dept. to represent Bali in Paritrana awards, a national award system for rewarding social compliance and good workforce management, in the Medium sized company category. After an extensive audit by the Indonesian Ministry of Manpower, and Zoom meetings with many judges and authorites we were put forward to the national award, and we were placed 3rd out of over 170,000 companies in this category in Indonesia. We were the first ever from Bali to get this far and also the first Foreign owned company to do so.. This was quite an accolade for Kapit Mas, its nice to be recognized for what we do, we walk the walk before we talk the talk! During the ceremony – which you can see at this link if you are interested! I got to meet many dignatairies including the Minister of Manpower and the Vice President of Indonesia, really putting Kapit Mas on the map!
A nice side effect of this has been the recognition we now get from potential candiditates for our recruitment requirements. In line with our restructuring of the factory we are also adding to qnd upgrading our technical and professional staff to help us with the implementations of these programmes
And so with all of these developments we are looking forward to serving you better during 2023, we wish you a very good year, we are always here to do what we can for you, and always appreciate your feedback and advice to help us help your company better.
Many Good Wishes,
Ben Morice
Founder/CEO