Sowing the seeds of lean cultural transformation

Both lean manufacturing and organisational cultural change are subjects often talked about, but seldom fully realised, especially outside of the automotive industry!  Changing mindsets, value systems or behaviours takes a lot more than an internal memorandum, especially if the changes are to be sustained in the long term.  Achieving these objectives requires a great many new skills and the alignment of every part of the organisation's management systems to drive the right behaviours.

This can be a bewildering, time consuming and costly exercise, unless it is approached with expertise and commitment.

Our client is a top 50 chemical organisation and a global player in the speciality chemicals market.  The organisation constitutes a hundred group companies, employing approximately twenty thousand people.  Having gone through a series of mergers and acquisitions, manufacturing cultural maturity varied significantly between sites.  In some sites, advanced continuous improvement was already in place, in others, operators primarily operated the plant and had little ownership over assets or plant improvement. 

Poorly performing sites were typified by low standards of cleanliness, even with relatively new machinery.  In these sites there was no culture in place to challenge the levels of housekeeping or take steps to improve them by identifying root causes of contamination.  Capacity losses were not measured at some facilities which, coupled with poorer plant standards, created unpredictable and significant downtime.  Strategic maintenance was also in its infancy so little preventative or predictive maintenance existed and plant replenishment and refurbishment were not properly controlled.  Furthermore, load was set to increase dramatically for certain sites so eliminating unplanned capacity losses was becoming imperative.

The challenge was, therefore, to sow the seeds of lean cultural transformation; quickly implanting the necessary skills and mindset in the teams to allow self-sufficient and sustained improvement in the future.

To read the case study in full, please click on the pdf link below:

Introducing Lean Culture at a Top 50 Chemical Organisation

For further information about this project please contact Kate Adams at kate.adams@wcigroup.com