Operational Excellence in Your Organization

Organizations are under continued pressure to improve and innovate products and services to remain relevant and sustainable. In many cases, some form of “transformation” program is conceived to help achieve this aim. The transformation itself may include the deployment of systems and processes that make the organization more capable of sustaining improvements and driving future change. “Change Agents” often act as coaches, trainers, mentors, and facilitators to embed change. In practice, these Change Agents must deal with resistance throughout different levels of the organization. These Change Agents must be able to act as flexible, multi-situational problem solvers, and teachers of those problem-solving skills. Only organizations that have developed a strong problem-solving capability can hope to survive for sustained periods of time.

This book describes many of the obstacles that Change Agents must overcome and the knowledge they need to make them credible with both leaders and the workforce they are tasked with navigating through an organizational transformation. Technical subjects such as diagnostic and improvement tools are described as well as pointing the reader in the direction of relevant theory and practical advice from the authors who have collectively more than 45 years of experience in such roles. Subject matter expertise in Lean Operations, Theory of Constraints, Six Sigma, Change Management, Excellence Models, Daily Management, and Problem Solving is used to describe some essential frameworks that can be brought together in a powerful system of improvement to aid organizations, but most importantly to support and encourage the Change Agent wherever they are in their career.

At some point, leaders and managers will also be expected to act as Change Agents. This work brings together simple, universal, accessible, and practical resources to help guide those front-line Change Agents regardless of particular industry or experience.

Fraser Wilkinson has been a CI professional for more than 20 years and has worked in a diverse range of industries from aircraft maintenance, coal mining, medical devices, consultancy, and most recently in steel. In his role as a Business Excellence Manager at Tata Steel Europe, he has been responsible for defining the Operational Excellence competency levels in the European operations and for delivering common training and development solutions to up-skill the ~30,000 employees across Europe. His focus is largely on the deployment of Daily Management and Practical Problem Solving and how these link into a robust Quality Management System. Fraser is a graduate of the Lean Enterprise Research Centre at Cardiff Business School (U.K.) where he completed the M.Sc. in Lean Operations under Professor John Bicheno in 2003 and is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt from his time at Johnson & Johnson. Fraser began his career as an aircraft maintenance engineer with the U.K. Ministry of Defence where he serviced Phantom F4 and Tornado fast jets for the Royal Air Force. His aerospace career took him all over Europe where he maintained aircraft for Swissair, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Sabena, Cargolux, and Fokker before returning to the United Kingdom to take up a post for British Airways as a maintenance planning engineer in 1993. He entered full-time further education in 1995 and completed a B.Sc. in Energy and Environmental Technology at the University of Glamorgan before being employed by Johnson & Johnson in 1999 to help the rollout of Lean and Six Sigma under the Corporate Process Excellence umbrella. Fraser joined Tata Steel in 2006 as a Continuous Improvement Coach where he was also involved in the deployment of Behavioral Safety, Change Management, and Project Management to deliver significant improvements in business performance.

Hervé Duval is a French and Luxemburgish Operational Excellence professional with 25 years of experience in industrial environments. He is currently the Business Excellence Manager in the Management Team of an international steel Business Unit. Hervé has been keen on learning since the first moments he can remember. He graduated as a material scientist from France’s prestigious Ecole des Mines de Nancy. In parallel to his career, he completed his MBA at Warwick Business School where his dissertation on lean thinking earned a distinction. His visits of thirty countries across the globe have been a massive source of learning. He also qualified as a Tata Business Excellence Model assessor, which allowed him to join assessment teams providing advice to boards of subsidiaries of the Tata Group in India and Europe in environments as diverse as IT, manufacturing, or infrastructure construction projects. Fortunately, he has also occupied very hands-on jobs in Customer Technical Services and Operations Management where operational friction reduces to ashes the best-laid textbook plans. These diverse experiences gave him an understanding of what could work and what did not, in particular the all-important role of leaders in creating a problem-solving culture to make organizations future-ready. He is now reaching the stage where he feels legitimate to start passing on some of the knowledge he’s acquired. He enjoys training, coaching, and mentoring within his company as well as giving lean awareness lectures to students. Co-writing the book Problem Solving Leadership has therefore been a natural decision as well as a further development opportunity through self-reflection for him.