Case Study 5 - Implementing an Excellence Program in a multinational

The Business

Large multinational organisation, with more than 40 operating sites spread across four continents.

The Problem

The leadership wanted to improve net earnings by increasing margins and reducing capital requirements. While a number of business improvement programs were in place, they were not delivering improvements fast enough.  A workshop aimed at speeding up the rate of improvement identified a number of issues to be overcome:

  • Improvement programs were often reactive, rather than proactive… letting market forces provide the impetus for change.
  • There was a lack of focus, and alignment across the business. 
  • There was poor visibility of how well processes were performing relative to their capability.
  • Only a small proportion of the workforce was actively engaged in improvement activities.

The Approach

The business wanted to address these issues in a systematic and coordinated way.  The approach taken was to develop and implement a business-wide Excellence Program.

Details

The chosen approach is outlined below.  It follows a model many businesses have used successfully to improve safety performance.

  • Developed a set of standards for the way a business should plan and manage its improvement work. This was done collaboratively to generate ownership and buy-in.
  • Developed a “gap analysis” tool so that businesses could assess themselves against the standards. Self-assessments rather than external audits were used to give managers more ownership of the results.
  • Required every business to develop an action plan to close its gaps. Skilled resources were made available to assist with the process.
  • Documented examples of good practices where they existed…to facilitate knowledge transfer.

There were some important things that were not done. 

  • The program did not mandate any particular improvement tool or approach (Six Sigma, or Lean etc) – each site was free to choose the methodology that best suited them. 
  • The organization did not set up a large centralised group of change agents.  The program made use of change agents already in place in the operating businesses. This kept the implementation cost down and the accountability for improvement where it belonged…at the site-level.

The Results

The operating sites making up this organisation varied significantly in size of operation, complexity, profitability and cultural context.  Despite these differences, we were able to develop a set common standards that were well-accepted by all. 

Managers found the gap analysis tool extremely useful for focussing their improvement efforts; helping them to make sense of all the dispirit initiatives going on across the business. 

A common set of standards facilitated collaboration between sites, and this proved to be a useful way of speeding up the implementation of new improvement techniques, and reducing their cost.

As a result of the program, operating managers set and achieved more aggressive improvement targets.  The level of workforce engagement with business improvement activities increased significantly.