Focusing on culture to continously improve

‍At Factbird Forward 2024, Trevor Hewson, lecturer at the University of Lincoln, gave us an insightful talk on what companies can do to drive continuous improvement. Trevor comes with a manufacturing background and expertise of over 30 years, so he knows what he's talking about!

To truly drive change, you need to put your people at the center. How can we drive improvement in the here and now?

The following is a summary of what Trevor presented at the event.

A little personal story

I want to tell you a story about a factory, this factory, part of a multi-site organization. Pretty large factory. Around 1,300 people work there. However, it was losing 10 million pounds against budget on a yearly basis.

So they've got problems with poor staff retention, partly due to location, but also due to competitors in the area. Production from that site was interchangeable between other sites. Now, that put this place at risk. Risk of closing. Losing 1,300 jobs in a pretty deprived area. We're going to come back to that. I'll tell you what happened with that site.

Beyond Industry 3.0

Now, one of the things I was asked to think about when I came up here was, how does industry 3.0 link into 4.0?

I think this flow has been natural. It goes back to Henry Ford with his piece of paper watching cars being made. He was analyzing data, but it just took him a lot longer. We're now in a position where we can analyze that data and get that data in really, really quickly.

How to CI (traditionally)

Traditionally, CI has worked pretty much on this process.

1. Define the scope

2. Identify opportunities

3. Develop the plan

4. Implement the changes

5. Monitor

6. Review

That's a fairly straightforward model. Traditionally, we've got the management, the behaviors at the top of that layer, really trying to push things, really trying to make a difference. In the middle, you've got the data layer with all the noise and all the noise coming backwards and forwards.

And then, further down you've got the processes, processes of generating the data, but not really sure how to use it. And you know, in an ideal world the flow there would be nice and fast. People able to access the data and able to use it effectively. That's theoretical space. The real world is a little bit different to that.

Theoretical space vs. real world

You can’t start your journey before you know where you are.

We want to know how we can drive improvement in the here and now. How do we get there? We need a roadmap of how we got there. And you don't know where you're going to go if you don't know where you're starting. You'll get lost very, very quickly if you do.

Within all businesses, we have little pockets of excellence. People wanting to drive, wanting to push on. We've got to grasp them and use them. The challenge is how you widen that engagement, how you pull people together, how you make sure that those pockets of excellence become pockets of growth and pockets of understanding. What stops that is the blockers to success.

As with any improvement, we need to understand the current state.​ We did ask a group of people what their improvement challenges were, and we highlighted five challenges.

How can we fix improvement challenges?

All of that linked together is about people. Every single part of that is about people, how you utilize those people. We've got brilliant systems. Factbird have got a great product and a number of great products, but we've got to access it and we've got to get the people involved to do that. We've got people that are doing the jobs for you, working on the shop floor for you, haven't got the skills.

25% of adults in the UK have poor numeracy skills. That instantly presents you a challenge. We've got great data. How are they going to access that and understand what that data means? You did a bit better in Denmark, you've got 15%, but I think everywhere can do better than that.

I was really, really pleased with what both Nikolaj and Søren talked about, the long term return on investment, being around skills and being around that knowledge and excellence. Søren mentioned someone called Lisa in the slides. Lisa was a team leader and accessed data to help them make effective decisions. Understanding what was going on. What we need is lots and lots and lots of Lisas, we need a whole shop floor to be Lisas.

We have to educate our teams. How do you do that?

• By making your improvement journey part of everything you do
• By ensuring your teams have the understanding they need
• By not easing off.

But also, and perhaps most importantly, do not scare off your workforce.

People talk about CI, they talk about improvement. And quite often they get scared or they become disengaged because of failures before. And that's a common theme through my career in the industry. I've seen that regularly. So, the way that I would approach embedding something like this, I would call it skills improvement. Call it skills improvement process, get people engaged, get people bought into what they're trying to do. And going back to the chart at the beginning, I would still define the goal.

A stronger approach to CI with a few new steps

• Define the goal: Understand the scope of the project.

• Train the team:  The next stage, though, is to train the team. The guys down here talked about long term return on investment coming from that.  I think that starts the process as well. You start that early, you get people involved in that journey, start helping them to understand what brilliant systems like this can give. Making sure they do it from a steady, continual level.

• Definitely don't stop here: don't stop when you've got round that cycle. Definitely, definitely don't stop. Because if you do, eventually you'll get caught up again and you'll be in the same position as you were when you started this process.

The rest of it's pretty much the same, really.

Broadened activity means broadened improvement

So I think it looks like broadened activity brought an improvement. Everybody's getting involved. We've got activity embedded in all areas. It's not just the shop floor, it's the HR team, it's the engineering team, it's the quality team. And again, some of the checks that Nikolaj described, we'll enable that. You got higher driving shop floor activity, extended and sustained improvement.

The challenge for you guys is to go and make it work. Create your own CI vision. What does it look like to your businesses? You know, it isn't just going on, doing a Kaizen event, it's doing so much more than that. It's not just about leveraging some data. It's doing so much more than that. Undertake your skills improvement project, linking in to your long-term return on investment that you talked about.

And making data work for your teams. Data has never been better. You know, I go back to the start of my career 30 odd years ago in the industry. The data was still there, it just took longer. Use data as your improvement. Starting off, help it guide you. Help it push you along.

I've got two messages for you to take away, to understand what I mean by this. I think the first part of everything you do is to standardize your activity. Make sure everybody's doing the same. That makes this measurement so much easier. It makes it so much more straightforward to control. So standardize that activity. But in doing that, make sure your teams are educated. Democratize their ability.

Key takeaways

• Standardize your activity and make sure everybody's doing the same
• Make data work as your improvement
• Make sure your teams are educated
• Democratize continuous improvement.

What happened in the story at the beginning?

I found this quite inspirational. I worked for the business, and over the course of 4 or 5 years, we slowly turned it around. It was led by somebody quite inspirational at the top, somebody who was very much a people person and drove things. Alongside him was somebody that was incredibly driven from a knowledge and, and a grasp of the minutiae of everything they did. Those two people understood that it was a skills improvement process. They made sure that improvement activity was driven into every single person in that place.

All 1,300 people played a part in the improvement activity there, and it really did help. It really did generate a churn. It didn't happen overnight. It took two years before we actually got control of things. However, we did. We got there. The factory turned around, this production facility making 1,300 people have a job, actually grew a little bit, grew to about 1,500 people. And it turned that 20 million loss into a 10 million profit against the budget. A real success story. Another example of how it's getting skills right, but linking it into the data, making sure the right level of data was coming along with those skills. Pulled everything together to create a sustainable change. The place is still improving, it's still getting better. You know, it's only 20 miles up the road for me, and it's really pleasing to be part of that.

I'm really pleased to see the thought process of some of the things Nikolaj explained here, that will further develop that and further improve that.

Okay. That's all from me. Thank you everybody.