Faiveley Transport Australia A Continuous Improvement Journey

Mark Carling, Managing Director Faiveley Transport Australia Ltd

May 2013

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Faiveley Transport Group

Faiveley Transport, a truely international Group 47 sites in 24 different countries.

NORTH

AMERICA

SOUTH AMERICA

WESTERN

EUROPE

EASTERN

EUROPE

PACIFIC

ASIA

6 sites incl. 3 1 4

400

16 sites incl. 8 13

1,400

3 sites incl. 3 1 3

100

19 sites incl. 17 6

18 2,800

1 site incl. 1 1

100

2 sites incl. 1 1 2

300

Production site Centre of competence Commercial site Employees

2

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Extensive Product Range

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Why Continuous Improvement?

• Faiveley Transport operates in a complex market which changes rapidly, and as such has an extremely complex business model (new sales, large projects, after-market sales, services).

• A multitude of problems result from this complex organisational environment. Everything from complex process breakdowns to simple inefficiencies that arise from the way a job is done.

• For many years, the company in Australia had fallen behind market demands because it had remained in a fixed state, whilst the needs of the market moved and changed.

• The sheer volume of issues to be addressed, whilst at the same time catching up with, and maintaining pace with market demands, lead to an almost insurmountable number of problems to overcome.

• The solution was therefore not a one-time fix, but a culturally driven program which would embed within the company an ongoing capability to improve, change and innovate, ensuring capability to cope with future market changes and demands.

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What Does It Look Like?

• Faiveley Transports Continuous Improvement System (CIS) is made up of multiple facets, but starts with the simple principal that everyone in the business participates in making the business better.

• As a minimum, every employee spends one hour per week engaged in CI activities based on their natural work teams, or natural process teams.

• Teams are assisted in determining their Key Result Areas (KRAs) that link directly to the company and site based Balanced Score Card (BSC), but largely determine improvement projects without the ‘directive’ of management.

• No Senior Manager is allowed to be a CI Team Leader, but they must pro-actively support the team(s) in their areas of reasonability. This creates a leadership challenge for the manager, who is judged on the output of their team(s) but is not allowed to directly manage them to create the outcome.

• In addition, the company also runs two Cross-Functional CI (CFCI) initiatives over a twelve week ‘program’, every eighteen weeks. Teams are selected from amongst the best CI employees to focus on a specific problem area that extends across the entire business (or at least a good portion of it).

• Everything is very visual. All CI teams have a Visual Communication Centre (or whiteboard!) dedicated to their activities.

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Our Journey So Far…

• In the early days, a lot of mistakes were made…!

• The first CI program was run based entirely on the 5S tool. It failed because there was no culture in place for improvement, and as such the tool was never used.

• The second attempt focused more on setting aside time for improvement, but it still took a great deal of hands-on work at the shop-floor and office-staff levels to get people to buy in to the process and understand what we were trying to achieve.

• Leadership continues to be a major focus. Teams need to be lead, but in order for the process to be one that fosters engagement, teams cannot be managed. They must feel like they are in control of the projects that they chose, but must be given clear guidance to ensure that these projects align with the needs of the business.

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Engagement – The Key and The Goal

• Continuous Improvement of this kind can help to create and maintain an engaged workforce, but it does not work without an engaged workforce… which is a bit of dichotomy.

• For Faiveley Transport Australia, this meant that the processes and systems implemented went through a long and slow ‘uptake’ phase, in which senior management had to invest a lot of time in dealing with negative input and fostering the right kind of approach.

• Getting the culture going in the right direction meant backing projects which would almost certainly fail, or at the very least deliver no benefit to the company.

• Tangible reward and recognition has been key to maintaining momentum. It is no coincidence that at the recent Faiveley Transport Australia Annual Award ceremony, five of the seven award winners were CI Team Leaders.

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Key Benefits

• An engaged workforce.

• A workforce that is always on the look-out for improvements, throughout the whole business.

• A good test for future business leaders.

• Genuine, tangible process and product improvements.

• A strong basis for a simple Reward and Recognition program.

• Visual communication principals that can be applied to vast amounts of the business, to help drive understanding.

• Having an organisation that already has an embedded change mindset makes adapting to changing market conditions rapidly becomes considerably easier.

• Innovation, whether it is product, service or business innovation, is much easier and faster when the whole organisation is aligned to the concept of continuous improvement and change.

• Deployment of complex improvement programs is also easier.

• Creation of a change-resilient and indeed, change-driven culture.

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Images

Continuous Improvement Meeting in Sydney

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Continuous Improvement VCCs in The Engineering Department

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Continuous Improvement VCC in The Warehouse

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Other forms of Visual Communication

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Where Next?

• Improvements are planned for the visual communication of Cross-Functional Continuous Improvement activities, to give greater visibility of what these teams are doing, and to ensure that participating team members are given due recognition.

• Further challenge for the Leadership Team to drive improvements using the CI processes, as more and more of the ‘low hanging fruit’ is dealt with. Maintaining momentum as wins get harder.

• Possible implementation of a gain sharing program for improvements based on their measurable benefit to the company.

Faiveley Transport Australia A Continuous Improvement Journey

Thank You