Establishing a standard procedure for Shop floor management in 39 plants worldwide
Client Sector: Engineering
Location: Shanghai, China
Our engineering client was faced with unstandardised and untransparent operations within the factory. In order to gain better oversight of productivity, performance and efficiency, they needed to implement a standardised shop floor management operating model across 39 production plants, worldwide. The implementation team faced two major challenges: plants with largely unstandardised practices and the reluctance of plant managers to comply with the new standards.
This situation required a compact, honest and culturally-sensitive change management approach with a strong focus on communication and training: challenge accepted!
We designed a Train the Trainer Conference Room Simulation which successfully:
- Brought all involved parties to the table, to design, improve and learn processes, methods and collaboration models within a medium complex setting.
- Analysed and considered the global dimensions of the project in terms of the local, cultural and historic differences. We then applied this insight when designing audience-appropriate simulations and methods for giving feedback.
- Helped managers to learn how to detect deviations from the company standard method, identify difficulties within meetings, and practice how to give feedback by watching “real” shop floor meetings.
- Trained the trainer by including all 39 local shop floor managers to take part in various role-plays covering different incidents, various moderator personality types and team attitudes.
- Helped our client to focus on improving their feedback and coaching skills, which was crucial for the successful implementation of shop floor management.
- Prepared managers to put their learnings into action by developing a personal roadmap for the implementation of shop floor management at their local plant.
The differences we made:
- The managers were able to train and prepare for real life situations.
- We ensured that the managers were well equipped to roll out the shop floor management standard in all 39 plants within months.
- All plants performed the Shop floor management to the global standard within 1.5 years.
- Our client achieved a ROI of several 1000 % by raising overall efficiency in production.
- Shop floor management is now a daily business on all levels of hierarchy at our client’s plants and managers have come to rely on it as indispensable.