Among the top 10 businesses of the country in 2023 are the Hungnam Fertilizer Complex and the Namhung Youth Chemical Complex.

The successes achieved by these units bring valuable experience to many industrial establishments.

Converting business management into work with people

The Hungnam Fertilizer Complex is a large-scale fertilizer producer of the country.

The employees of the complex took a step forward in the work for readjustment and reinforcement including the increase of clean water production capacity of the water supply workshop 1.5 times, while overfulfilling its national economic plan last year, which was of key importance in implementing the five-year plan.

The complex works hard to ensure it would become a continuing success.

The primary duty in industrial management is to work with people well and this is the policy of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

Even if a business is fully equipped with modern facilities and properly supplied with raw and other materials and the production organization, leadership ability and technical and practical qualifications of its officials are high, it is unthinkable to make any development unless its employees play the role of actual masters of business management in accordance with the principles of socialist management.

The complex made sure that all the innovative measures taken to improve the production and management activities were surely directed to improving the ideological viewpoint and work attitude of officials and raising the consciousness and enthusiasm of employees as masters of them.

After hearing the report that the Seventh Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea was to be held early in February last year, the working people in the complex turned out in the campaign for increasing the fertilizer production by thousands of tons.

At that time, officials of the complex seriously discussed how to increase the daily fertilizer output.

Many ideas were suggested there including what kinds of technical problems should be solved before anything else, who in which workshops were suitable for solving them and what were needed to provide the conditions for research for technical innovations.

But at the time the senior official of the complex drew a distinct line, saying that it is of course important to solve technical problems, but more important is to inspire the working people. “To raise their spirit and pool their wisdom--herein lies the key to solving the problem,” he added.

All the officials took an active part in the political work and worked together with the employees at the workplaces.

A dramatic surge was brought about in the fulfilment of the production plan of the complex.

The complex also turned technical innovation and readjustment and reinforcements into work with people.

It was beyond discussion that technical innovation and readjustment and reinforcement in the complex depended on how actively the officials, technicians and workers take part in them.

Today, too, officials of the complex unanimously say that what the masses were most sympathetic as they did political work among them was that the workers of the complex take great pride in implementing the Party’s policies.

Powerful mass technical innovation drive

The Namhung Youth Chemical Complex, which has put production and management activities on a new scientific basis to achieve amazing production results this year again after last year, is definitely turning the development of science and technology into an affair of all employees themselves.

In any units of the complex are seen at once the boxes for good ideas of new technical innovations.

That these boxes were fixed on every unit did not mean everything went well of their own accord as it desired.

The complex attached noticeboards related to the boxes in conspicuous places in its compound and introduced in detail that they could be used by all employees and prizes would be awarded to the ideas recognized by the complex as significant after examination according to their value, high or low.

It appraised the employees who set an example in thinking up new innovative ideas regularly and effectively in the meetings for the review of monthly production to steadily fire public enthusiasm for it. The number of novel ideas for technical innovation suggested in the third quarter of this year increased 5.5 times over the same period of last year, a simple fact showing the radical change taking place in the complex.

With the utility rate of these boxes growing, the complex informatized the work.

It opened a new idea box in the homepage of LAN to ensure the openness, accuracy and promptness of the conception and introduction of technical innovations more strictly and broaden the scope of conception ranging from scientific and technological issues to those of business management.

It also attached importance to the operation of sci-tech learning space, a base for disseminating new technologies.

It regularly learned about the running of its sci-tech learning space and took measures to overcome deviations.

It built a local area network in workshops to diffuse scientific and technological data so that employees could read them near the workplaces at any time, and assigned workshops to those in charge of sci-tech dissemination to ensure they worked at the workplaces for one or two hours every day to learn about the data needed for sci-tech development in the relevant units and helpful to the workers' conception of novel ideas.

And it encouraged them to search for relevant scientific and technological data in the data communication network and add them to the database of the local area network in time.

It made it possible to solve the sci-tech problems arising in the workplaces promptly.

The process of promotion and evaluation of talents also improved.

The complex ensured that talents were objectively and fairly assessed for what they are needed when they were reenlisted in the first and second half of the year.

In other words, primary importance was attached to the devotion to society and the collective before the technical knowledge and skills of each employee. As a result, all the employees tried hard to become true talents with a high sense of patriotism as they acquired technical knowledge and skills and it became a tendency of the complex.

The technical innovation drive, in which all the employees take active part with great enthusiasm, was really powerful and this was the main factor behind an enormous boost in the production of the complex, say its officials.