Our client required interim site leadership whilst a full time candidate was recruited. The brief was to guide and coach the factory management team and develop and implement a transformation program to improve Safety, Quality, Delivery and Cost performance which was below target compared to other sites within the group. The longer term aspiration was to being the sites performance to “World Class”.

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Approach

 

Upon being fully briefed by Regional and Area management much of the first 2 weeks were spent carrying out one to one meetings with the factory management team, engaging with as many shopfloor employees as possible and spending time walking the shop floor to assess basic standards, understand the process flows and identify waste and bottlenecks.

 

Two key findings of the initial 2 week review were that

 

• Whilst each function had their own agendas and plans these were not aligned against a clear vision for the future.

• Cross functional review of daily performance to understand causes and implement short and long terms corrective actions was not in place.

     

Actions were taken to address these points as follows.

 

A Vision for World Class

 

In order to develop a shared vision workshops were facilitated with all functional leads and representatives of the sales and commercial units. This allowed the team to agree the core role and responsibilities of the site in delivering high quality products to customers on time in full, develop a vision for becoming “World Class” and form a “line of sight” around shared priorities and targets.

 

Based upon these workshops a phased transformation plan was developed for the journey to “World Class” for presentation to and sign off from senior management.

 

The transformation plan was split into 3 distinct phases – Stabilisation, Improvement and Optimisation.

 

For each of the phases KPI targets were developed against a baseline to track progress, improvement and transition between phases.

 

Detailed workstreams were developed with each of the sites functional leads setting out the key actions they would own to stabilise and improve factory performance as part of the first phase. As the client had a matrix organisation functional workstreams were discussed, reviewed and agreed with the relevant stakeholders within the Area and Regional Structures.

 

A governance structure was put in place with the clients senior management in order to track progress, budgets, review any risks or issues arising and make decisions on any material changes to scope, timing or budgets. The governance group meeting frequency was set as monthly.

 

Daily Performance Management

 

In order to focus the management team on daily performance and addressing reasons for performance loss a daily performance meeting was introduced. An initial dashboard as developed using simple whiteboards in an available office. The meeting was limited to 30 minutes and had a fixed agenda covering Safety, Quality, Cost, Delivery, Production, Continuous Improvement and People. This meeting served 2 purposes to share information with all factory management regarding the performance over the last 24 hours and agree actions to address any immediate issues for the next 24hrs.

 

As management became familiar with the process a dedicated Daily Meeting Room was prepared on the shopfloor and Visual KPI boards based upon the clients corporate Continuous Improvement standards were created. As experience and confidence grew the meeting moved from purely info sharing to focus on corrective actions which could be one offs fixed immediately (within 24hrs) or systemic and longer term which would become a separate project under one of the transformation workstreams.

 

In the 4 months following the introduction of the Daily Performance Meetings being introduced there was an increase in safety system compliance, near miss reporting and zero recorded LTI’s. Instance of Quality Non-Conformance and Customer complaints reduced by 50%, OTIF was consistently above corporate target and lead times reduced. In addition to this overtime which had been running overbudget was brought back below target.

 

As the process matured similar meetings were implemented at a production area / machine level to engage more of the workforce and drive greater ownership of performance to operator and technician level.

 

Summary

 

Delivering sustained and sustainable improvement requires all employees to have clarity on the role and purpose of their business. A “Vision” is also required as this aligns all parts of the organisation behind a common goal and drives an end to end business focus rather than a silo’d functional approach.

 

Progress towards the vision is accelerated when there are daily performance processes and routines which engage and empower the workforce in ownership and improvement of the parts of the business which they control.

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