Me and my colleague are both new to our company, (me 1 month, him 2 months), our department consists of us, the young apprentice and our team leader.
Me and my colleague have both noticed we have tonnes of unused stock, jobs that could be performed faster and safer (a big plus when working with heavy machinery) and also the fact there's no work instructions for jobs, just drawings, which don't include fitting instructions for things such as jigs and frames used, so it's all word of mouth.
Our team leader seems to actively stand in the way of us making improvements though and will start us on new tasks that can't be finished due to parts shortages, rather than use the time to sort out the other processes, even though we've already managed to change a 3 day job into a half day job and drastically reduced the amount of lifts with the crane and made it so nobody has to be in close proximity of live loads, so much safer. Plus we're already in to next week's production.
So we've taken to going straight over his head and voicing all our ideas directly to the production manager, who is praising us consistently for our efforts, making sure it's explicitly known the ideas were from the two of us and driven by us. We've also just implemented a system that will, over the course of a few months, show which fastenings we actually use and what is obsolete stock, showing that the engineering department, who are apparently looking at the issue are doing bugger all. Then we're writing all our own work instructions, with photos to again, show engineering are doing fuck all.
The plan is to document everything, plus the time, space and safety aspects of what we have done. This both shows our higher ups how indespensible we are and how useless some of the team leaders are and gives me the personal record to show other companies when I decide to leave this one in the dirt.
Sometimes going above your pay grade can be fun, if only to shit on those who are in those positions.