Ahmad Tea

Background

Ahmad Tea is a UK-based family business, drawing on four generations of tea blending and tasting experience. The company has a number of manufacturing sites worldwide, with their state of the art factory in Ras Al Khaimah UAE as their flagship facility.

This UAE facility rose from a virgin site in December 2010 to full production in just over a year. Now handling high daily tonnages of premium tea products, this indicates a stratospheric rise in output. The effect of this rapid growth and establishment of Good Practices meant that the warehouse department was in need of refresher training for its Mechanical Handling Equipment (MHE) operators. Ahmad Tea therefore needed a dynamic and professional provider to deliver outstanding “British grade” training into a high-paced and already efficient environment; thus enabling improvement on established and outstanding operational achievements.

The operators had advanced beyond the limits of their initial training (when machinery was new) and now needed the support of Senior Management. This was firstly, to address concerns that had developed over time, and secondly, to invest in the individuals with a higher level of task specific training and operational awareness than their initial training had offered.

Outcome

A bespoke training solution was developed by Mark Carter, one of PDM’s most experienced instructors, who also travelled to the UAE to deliver the package. “This was a fantastic project to be involved with. Issues of language and workplace cultural differences were quickly overcome, making the training enjoyable and rewarding for both myself and the operators.”

Roy McFarlane is Group Engineering Manager for Ahmad Tea.

“Our team in Ras Al Khaimah has delivered outstanding results, through every person doing their level best. Ahmad Tea recognised that the many novel work-arounds developed by the Logistic Team had produced fantastic results but this success had come at the cost of MHE operator confidence. It was therefore essential to reinforce Good Practice and maintain the outstanding safety record by listening to the MHE operators.

For this dynamic approach we needed a broadly experienced, commercially nimble, safety focussed and above all, impartial training provider and PDM delivered on all of these aspects.

We now have a workforce that:

• Is empowered, effective and safe;
• Has the task specific knowledge needed to maintain high-paced operations whilst mitigating potential hazards;
• Has the trust of management to continue to deliver to high expectations;
• Most importantly, feel they have been invested in and are listened to at the very highest level.

Only a company like PDM, which offers a personal customer interface and outstanding trainers, could deliver a programme of this scale without affecting warehouse operations”.