Aircraft Engine Manufacturer
SITUATION
Large US aircraft jet engine manufacturer enlisted The Highland Group to help migrate its extremely effective Lean Manufacturing concepts to its office processes.
DRIVER GOAL
- Achieve $50 million in financial benefits by year end by developing and implementing a System For Managing to ensure that "High Impact Teams" perform to schedule, cost and quality.
RESULT
- Developed the process to continuously monitor and reprioritize high impact projects.
- Determined enabler projects and linkage to high impact projects.
Case Study
Broaden Lean Transformation, Track Performance & Quantify Savings
Issue
A large US aircraft jet engine manufacturer enlisted The Highland Group to help migrate its extremely effective Lean Manufacturing concepts to its office processes in order to improve its ability to meet customer performance specifications. Leadership also needed to link/translate the improvements from all of its Lean (manufacturing and office) efforts to bottom line financial performance.
Highland Approach
The Highland Group analyzed the organization’s office operations and identified several opportunities for efficiency improvement and waste/redundancy removal, which were subsequently targeted with High Impact Team projects. To quantify and capture savings from the various projects, the team implemented a System For Managing that included various tools for prioritizing projects, tracking savings, and linking the efforts of each work team to organizational goals.
Actions Taken
- Identified (and took action to correct) organizational “silos,” ineffective structures, poorly defined roles and responsibilities and other barriers to performance, ensuring on-time achievement of team deliverables and financial benefits.
- Incorporated a Customer Recommended Priority process.
- Provided a strategic factoring process to determine what needed to be done to advance the company’s position.
- Established effort/benefit measure categories and descriptions with rating criteria and weight of each.
- Developed and implemented a system for quantifying financial benefits and resource requirements of each team project and then prioritizing their execution.
- Developed metrics to track and report actual versus planned benefits and expenditures for each team.
- Implemented a System For Managing (integrating existing client management tools) to link work teams to high-level Driver Goals and track performance.
