ClarityUK - focused excellence

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Transformation

Transformational change is required when the performance of business dictates that incremental change will either not deliver the required results or will do so too slowly. The goal is for a guiding coalition of key managers to redefine the business root and branch, effectively constructing a new business model.

The transformational approach is rapid and dramatic in its results, but also by necessity involves business risk. The role of ClarityUK is to facilitate ideas, provide a sound methodology for evaluating the potential benefits and risks of proposed changes and to support the planning and execution of the change .

Example:
A wood milling business in Grangemouth was turning over £14M per year and losing £3M. The group to which it belonged calculated that to turn it round by reducing labour only would require the existing staff to be reduced from 159 to 54.
Over 16 weeks, we worked together with the management team to develop an alternative business. The project removed unprofitable elements of the portfolio, particularly those requiring significant overhead support; grouped the production equipment to form high volume and low volume cells and changed shift patterns to maximise utilisation of key resources. The resulting business model reached was:-

Turnover £12M
Employees 76

Operational Excellence

Operational excellence is a journey rather than a goal. The journey implies constantly improving:
- process capability and efficiency
- management and control of resources
Doing this well requires the understanding of a number of principals and tools, but more importantly their use, which in turn requires the appropriate management behaviours and ways of thinking.

The role of ClarityUK in an operational excellence programme is to challenge the status quo, enhancing the existing measures, routines and behaviours to deliver a more profitable business with established plans to achieve significant further improvements

Example:
A copper wire enamelling business was delivering an average of 245T a week at an OEE of 85% including a scrap level of 7% and needed to increase its output to 285T to meet increasing demand.
By improving changeover methods and preventive maintenance routines, as well as by changing oven profiles and numbers of passes the final results were:-

Average weekly output 300T
Maximum output 345T
Scrap 3.5%

Sales and Operations planning

The objective of the S&OP work stream is to enable the business to find the least cost solution to balancing resources, service and risk.
To be truly effective, the S&OP process must link all areas of the business together to create a process that not only converts expected sales into labour, equipment and material resources, but also allows for the introduction of new products and processes, forecasts profitability and allows simple scenario planning.

The role of ClarityUK is to provide expertise in forecasting, inventory and resource planning and the integration of an upgraded S&OP process into the business, ensuring that the process delivers real bottom line results.

Example:
A manufacturer of retail consumable items needed to reduce inventory but without impacting service. Indeed it also needed to improve service to avoid a service issue that had arisen the previous year.
The key elements that were introduced were an upgraded forecasting process, optimised batch sizes, inventory segmentation, shop floor performance feedback, supplier reviews and the meeting disciplines required to support the new ways of working. The results of this were:-

Inventory reduction £750k (25%)
Christmas service issue Avoided

Capability and Quality

The objective of the capability and quality work stream is to minimise the cost of quality for a business. This combines yield / waste, giveaway (in food manufacturing), and the cost of rejects and returns .

The role of ClarityUK is to provide and transfer the analytical and statistical tools that enable a business not just to control quality, but to reduce its cost to the best achievable within the capability of the process.

Example:
A food product manufacturer had been forced to withdraw product from the shelves (at a cost of over £10M) as the result of a quality problem that did not become evident for a number of weeks after it had been manufactured and was not evident from any of the sampling and measurement techniques used
By collecting all the data gathered over a number of months and analysing it as a series of independent data sets a model was created that could predict for any set of variables the likely level of risk. This was used to reset the acceptable operating variables used for process control, vastly reducing the level of product risk the results were:

Average daily complaints reduced by: 95%

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