Case Study: British construction and engineering company

Understand

We began by investing time upfront to confirm direction and goals, establish strong change leadership, and identify potential barriers to success.

We worked with senior members of the Business Improvement team and Project Managers to:

• Create a high-level production control deployment plan to meet the needs of the business
• Help Project Managers to identify how and when production control will be implemented on their projects
• Develop a detailed roll-out plan
• Identify the resources needed to deliver the plan

Building Capability

For a successful and sustainable deployment, it’s important to develop the skills needed to lead and support the ongoing Production Control process.

Once the team had identified the need for upskilling a series of short production control awareness sessions to ‘spread the word’ were added to the plan.

During the delivery of these sessions, several volunteers were identified to train as practitioners in the tools and techniques to facilitate the application production control techniques.

Once Practitioners were agreed a series of Practitioner training sessions were delivered by a Bourton Consultant and followed up with on-site support through facilitation of workshops and further coaching in the application of process improvement tools and techniques.

Managing Success

Ensuring efforts don’t stall or drift off course was important to achieve an effective deployment. Therefore, the team spent time developing a strategy for Managing and maintaining direction and pace through:

• Communicating regularly/informally with key stakeholders to ensure the production control roll-out is meeting business requirements
• Developing a set of visual controls which were used to provide simple and quick reporting of production control progress
• Developing a formal monthly report which summarised progress and clearly quantified the cumulative business benefits gained from the roll-out
• Development and implementation of a site maturity assessment tool used by the site teams to assess their own maturity whilst helping to identify the actions needed to get to full maturity

Building Capability

For a successful and sustainable deployment, it’s important to develop the skills needed to lead and support the ongoing Production Control process.

Once the team had identified the need for upskilling a series of short production control awareness sessions to ‘spread the word’ were added to the plan. During the delivery of these sessions, several volunteers were identified to train as practitioners in the tools and techniques to facilitate the application of production control techniques.

Once Practitioners were agreed a series of Practitioner training sessions were delivered by a Bourton Consultant and followed up with on-site support through facilitation of workshops and further coaching in the application of process improvement tools and techniques.

Managing Success

Ensuring efforts don’t stall or drift off course was important to achieve an effective deployment. Therefore, the team spent time developing a strategy for Managing and maintaining direction and pace through:

• Communicating regularly/informally with key stakeholders to ensure the production control roll-out is meeting business requirements
• Developing a set of visual controls which were used to provide simple and quick reporting of production control progress
• Developing a formal monthly report which summarised progress and clearly quantified the cumulative business benefits gained from the roll-out
• Development and implementation of a site maturity assessment tool used by the site teams to assess their own maturity whilst helping to identify the actions needed to get to full maturity

Production Control Deployment

Once the plan was in place and Practitioner/Awareness training had commenced and monitoring/reporting agreed then the rollout to each of the project teams needed to commence.

The team then identified several priority sites which would receive a high level of Bourton support to fully implement the Collaborative Planning and Production Control process.

A phased approach to deployment was then developed and fully supported by a Bourton consultant at the priority sites. These sites were then used as exemplar sites to reduce the need for intense consultancy support.

Once a process of Collaborative Planning and Production Control was established within the site team further support requirements were assessed such as:

• Coaching in-house team members in Continuous Improvement tools and techniques through short training sessions and then support in ‘go do ‘activity
• Support in setting up and facilitation of monthly/weekly daily production control workshops to maintain the plans
• Identification and implementation of improvement projects needed to maintain the pace of delivery and make efficiency gains
• Coaching and supporting the teams in delivering more significant improvement projects using for example the DMAICT methodology