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Aerospace-170
The Situation:
A large US aircraft jet engine manufacturer whose products are used in both civil and military applications wanted to migrate its highly successful and extremely effective “Lean Manufacturing” concepts to all other areas of their business process (Lean Office). Additionally, the client was experiencing difficulty in capturing the gains of “Lean Manufacturing” in its financials with their inability to meet customer performance specifications and requirements causing delays in development projects with the resulting cost overruns.
The Highland Group was asked to assess the progress of over fifty operating clients teams organized into 8 high level “high impact” teams, each team was populated with both lean and six sigma personnel. Additionally, The Highland Group was ask to identify areas of opportunity both within and across these teams to accelerate progress, to quantify all teams’ financial benefits ensuring no double counting of such would occur, to qualify all team planned investment expenditures and to develop a process to “evergreen” prioritization these Projects for proper resourcing and management follow-up to ensure that expected financial results appeared on the bottom line of the organization.
The Driver Goal:
Develop and implement a System for Managing within each of the eight currently operating High Impact Teams and their sub-teams (over fifty) to ensure that each team performs to schedule, cost, and quality thereby gaining $50 million in financial benefits by yearend.
Actions Taken:
- Developed and implemented a system for identifying each team projects financial benefits including timing
- Established benefit measure categories and descriptions with rating criteria and weight of each
- Developed and implemented a system for quantifying the total effort required to achieve the expected financial benefits of each of the High Impact Team projects
- Established effort measure categories and descriptions with rating criteria and weight of each
- Incorporated a Customer Recommended Priority process
- Provided a Strategic Factoring process
- Determined and documented the projects financial impacts and assigned priorities
- Developed metrics to track and report actual benefits against planned and actual expenditures against projected for each team
- Implemented a System for Managing for all teams, integrating existing client management tools
The Results:
- Identified more than $900 million in benefits over a 5 year period with over $50 million by current yearend
- Developed the process to continuously monitor and reprioritize these High Impact Projects
- Identified existing Organizational “silos”, structure, roles and responsibilities issues, barriers to performance and execution, and ERP implementation impacts for removal ensuring on-time team deliverables and financial benefits
- Determined enabler Projects and linkage to High Impact Projects
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