Optimising the momentum of Change to Lean processes and Teams

Lean a Pan-European end-to-end Core business process + Operational Excellence rollout.

APPROACH

Leaning the process

Investing in the company also implies investing in people. Providing them with insights, knowledge, best practices, and guiding them in the learning curve whilst they are acquiring new or  improved competences. All 8 ambassadors got 6 intensive days of training, spread across several months, with 'homework' in between the sessions. The process got mapped in workshops, as did the identification of wastes. For several specific problems we setup Kaizen sessions to sustainably tackle them. Senior Management also followed Lean trainings, thus deepening their understanding of Lean's essentials, and insuring they could play their role as lean-sponsors appropriately. A key success factor. Gradually, and with the necessary coaching at different levels, in different locations, improvements got implemented. The goal: reduce the cycle time of a 'complete business transaction', so that i.e. during a year more cycles can be processed. We also made sure that everyone in the company, at a monthly interval, got an update (interactively) on 'lean in our company'. 

Operational Excellence

Communication = priority 1. As part of the Operational Excellence implementation, at the majority of teams in Belgium we installed white board sessions. The enabler for all other improvements. In each  team we began with an extensive introduction session. With lots of room for questions. The Lean principles were explained, we gave examples of how these principles could be translated into a day-to-day reality, and we emphasysed the need for some volunteers. They are essential to define their respective needs. Also, later-on in the Operational Excellence projects we needed their knowledge, experience and expertise in their business to maximise ‘Fitness For Use’ of our improvements. Without this input, it would be near impossible to design the ‘right & functioning’ solutions. So, per team, a small OE-project-team was formed.

RESULT

Leaning the process

The throughput time got reduced by over 10%. This might not seem that much, but it concerns their core business process that had already been continuously improved over the past years. Bottom line impact of this: it opens the door to revenue (and profits) increases of 10% - without having to invest in additional resources or ICT-tooling. In addition to this, customers get a better customer-experience, as they received their goods faster than before.

Best practices and improvements from HQ and satellite offices across Europe became standardised, leading to an easier manageability of the end-to-end process. The KPI’s embedded in process management are easy-to-use visual trendlines. As this project involved all satellite offices, the respective country managers’ understanding of Lean also improved.

Operational Excellence

Best practices sharing, standardising tasks, and continuous improvement are all terms that have been turned from ‘principles’ into their day-to-day reality.

The majority of teams now have white board sessions. The impact isn’t limited to very effective communication within the respective teams, at the same time it significantly facilitates communications amongst the teams. Hard to quantify the impact, but the fact that and TLs and staff find these sessions essential for their functioning says a lot.

These teams now have a structural systematic approach to identify and distribute the workload. There’s transparancy (who is assigned with what’, and the status is visually clear to all. During the entire duration of this Lean implementation journey we leveraged their already existing Company Values (‘Normen en Waarden’). It deepened the adherence of these values. The icing on the cake was the employees’ realisation that the Lean ‘mindset/culture/filosophy’ actually complemented these values.