HOW RESTROOM BREAK ABUSES WERE ELIMINATED AT ORIENTAL TIN CAN

How EDS' unique innovation encouraged shorter rest room breaks

"Time is gold". This oft heard saying holds especially holds true for production facilities. Being the Philippine's leading supplier of metal packaging for the biggest sardine and canned food manufacturers, Oriental Tin Can (OTC), has continuously aimed to enhance its productivity. From its humble beginnings in 1935, OTC has grown and today employs 1,000. This large work force makes productivity enhancement all the more challenging.

One of the productivity zappers of OTC is when employees abuse restroom or CR (comfort room) breaks. Due to the ubiquity of smart phones and other mobile devices and data plans, employees extend their CR breaks by watching movies, playing games or engaging with social media, all inside the rest room. It has been estimated that every quarter hour wasted by its 1,000 employees cost the company approximately P 19,000 per day.

EDS provided a customized solution for OTC that reduced if not eliminated the CR break abuses. Each rest room was installed with turnstiles integrated with biometrics. Every time an employee enters and departs a rest room, he/she is required to biometrically scan to unlock the turnstile. The captured time IN and OUT are automatically recorded enabling calculation of the CR break duration.

CR break durations are totalled on a daily basis for individual employees and compared to the company wide monthly CR break average. Outliers on the right side of this average will be addressed by management via friendly direct dialogue. Based on observation, CR break abuses were immediately reduced just by the mere knowledge that management was monitoring the CR break duration.

CR break abuses were immediately reduced just by the mere knowledge that management was monitoring the CR break duration.

Regarding labor law and human rights, nothing was violated as the system simply monitored these breaks.

OTC has been successfully using this customized system since 2012.