Of the five pilot workshops, one was
an SMMT lean manufacturing workshop and the remainder VIP culture
change workshops.
The lean manufacturing workshop was conducted by the shop
floor at Westinghouse Brakes Limited (WBL) and led to on time
product delivery improving from 75% to 100%, a reduction in
the labour per unit ratio of over 60% and an improvement of
50% in the not-right first time measure.
WBL were so impressed that, at their own cost, they are rolling
the SMMT workshops out across the whole business resulting
in 2002 in hard savings (direct labour and materials) of £56,000
and soft savings (overhead and inventory) of £262,000.
Larger hard savings of £240k and soft savings of over
£1m are targeted for 2003.
Some 25% of WBL’s manufacturing staff are now actively
involved in what is a self-sustaining change programme with
no further need for external facilitation expenditure. And
waste reduction is now part of the daily WBL routine, also
helping to make their operations safer. The WBL MD has said
of the lean workshops:-
“The SMMT approach is focused internally and has
been the most successful “waste cutting” programme
in which we have participated. We have demonstrable improvements
in productivity which payback so well that we have adopted
the programme at our expense as a “no brainer”.
At a recent visit by consultants AT Kearney (as part of a
Group parent Knorr-Bremse benchmarking initiative), AT Kearney
found us clear leaders in the worldwide group in “lean
manufacturing”. We are now moving the programme into
the “uncharted area” of our administration departments,
where we are starting to see enormous opportunities for improvement.”
Of the four VIP culture change workshops, one was an open
programme attended by six companies with varying specialities
including signalling, infrastructure work and consultancy.
Two others involved Railtrack and signalling and infrastructure
maintenance companies. The fourth and most recent example
is being conducted between ALSTOM Parts and Materials (P&M)
and WBL (who have therefore had experience of both types of
workshop).
Although this ALSTOM P&M/WBL pilot is still ongoing the
initial results are already impressive. The number of parts
lines held has been reduced by roughly 50%. And parts availability
has also improved from 41% at the start of the exercise to
around 75% in July, with a target to reach 98% by September.
Overall, the replacement parts process is now much more controlled,
resulting in better service and lower costs. The MD of ALSTOM
P&M says that VIP has delivered:-
“ · An understanding of each other’s
requirements and constraints
· Joint behavioural change
· Regular dialogues – much better communication
· Improved motivation
· Targeted areas of problem resolution
This has enabled the use of tools and techniques greatly
improving service to our customer”
And the WBL MD said:-
“In 2002 we started to participate in the [culture
change] programme which looks at the ‘softer side’,
of customer-supplier relationships and company to company
waste. Again this programme has been fully funded by ourselves.
This is a much harder process of culture change but with even
greater potential reward. In an industry structured with layers
of contractual, arms length relationships, we have found that
we don’t have to pick the low hanging fruit –
only avoid standing on it!
We have two teams working together from Alstom and ourselves
looking at the way we work (and don’t work) together,
with focus on reducing supply lead times without increasing
supply chain inventory. The results of this programme will
be presented later this month. What is already clear is that
we have an improved working relationship and we can see a
satisfying shift towards looking at serving the end customer
goals associated with rolling stock in service availability
targets.”
The facts and figures above speak for themselves - the
workshops deliver.
Further details can be found on the relevant slides from
the 1 July presentation to the Railway Forum that is also
available on the RIA web-site.
