Culture beats Strategy! Even with the best technical solutions great efforts can fail in the pursuit of operational excellence if we don't work with people in the right way.
Having led positive change across many cultures and businesses, Virrata has gained great insight in to what the key ingredients are for successfully transforming manufacturing operations and what is needed to generate a critical mass of advocates. We can work with your team to implement and underpin improvements in operational excellence, ensuring those benefits are maintained long beyond initial implementation.
Case study - Employee engagement and management style
The client need:
A long established plant needed to conduct a lean transformation in order to improve deeply engrained ways of working. The plant had always operated in a very hierarchical way with decisions made at the top and passed down. Employee involvement would need to increase significantly if the overall changes were to stick.
What we did:
We worked with the mangement team, with operators and supervisors throughout the plant, modeling the desired culture, coaching and training at all levels. We introduced visual management, standard management and standard work and engaged the workforce in contrbuting to the improvements across the plant. The local team developed and implemented a new flow solution with our guidance and support.
What they got:
In the beginning the Plant Manager said he would be happy if we could bring 50% of what we talked about to the plant. In reality we brought much more. Performance in the plant improved in key metrics. One value stream was transformed as a model to be rolled out across the plant. The changes were evident to the entire plant and this provided a catalyst for further improvement, with ideas generated and implemented at all levels of the organisation.
Flow: Verb [fləʊ]
> To proceed continuously and smoothly
> Glide along as a stream
Flowing > Progressive tendency
Flow of spirits > Habitual cheerfulness