Innovation: A labour productivity improvement strategy for the automotive assembly organisation in South Africa

Over the years, productivity performance has been the subject that generated enormous interest amongst economic scholars. This shows the value of productivity on business growth. Hence, the implementation of improved interventions for productivity improvement requires appropriate innovative practices for industries. This sentiment supports the importance of innovation for productivity improvement. Consequently, this study assesses the influence of innovation on labour productivity in an automotive assembly organisation in South Africa. It has been established that the manufacturing industry in South Africa has low labour productivity compared with its BRICS counterpart countries like Russia, India and China. As a result, this study centres its attention on innovation, considering low levels of labour productivity in the manufacturing sector of South Africa. It was quantitative in design and the investigation was achieved by collecting pre-and post-innovative quarterly data for spoilage and the achievement of production targets. The study analysed the production and related experiences of an automotive assembly organisation, operating in KwaZulu-Natal in the eThekwini Municipality that had adopted an innovative seat-handling manipulator in its assembly process. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model, using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), was used to analyse data. The study indicates that spoilage rate and the achievement of production targets have the relationship with labour productivity after an innovative seat handling manipulator was implemented in the organisation.