Introduction

This organisation is a major provider of Agricultural and Construction Equipment. The organisation is headquartered in the USA with plants worldwide. The organisation had a turnover of $6bn and 20,000 staff until a recent acquisition pushed up the numbers to $14bn with a total of 35,000 employees.

Intervention

Initially, the intervention was focused in Paris, concentrating upon bringing disparate Plants and Functions together to work on cross functional and geographic projects. This began in 1994. Major conference events were held under the banner of 'Culture Change' to focus upon the importance of implementing quality improvement across all European geographies, including the UK, Germany, France and Austria. Project Teams were formed that worked together over periods of six months and the results of their investigations were fedback directly to the European Chief of Operations and his team where best practice was considered and rolled out to the Plants most suited for implementation.

This intervention grew into a series of Workshops that were held in the UK for five years up till present day and attended by professionals from all the European Plants.

The intervention also developed in the USA and has operated from 1998. A variety of Plants worked with the material over a period of three years, and performance improvement was assessed in four major US installations.

Also within specific Manufacturing organisations within the larger organisations, the focus was upon developing Engineers into Organisational Change Agents, with a special emphasis upon creating behavioural change. Over the period of the course of this project over 200 senior technical staff have attended a series of three, high level modules, designed especially to ensure their organisational ability to drive change is of the same high standard as their technical ability to master operational difficulties.

Benefits

• Cross-functional working becoming business as usual - rather than being process driven. People working across geographic boundaries (in Europe) looking at operational efficiencies from a number of angles and focusing upon and agreeing to 'best practice'.
• Focusing upon 'Business Units' or Plants (USA) and developing strategic change strategies that create the culture that drives business results.
• Re-designing specific engineering roles into change agent roles where staff were both technically capable and more than competent in using behavioural tools when driving change.
• Establishing 'Customer Focused Strategies' to drive Business Plans, especially within key support areas.
• Team Leadership and peer assessment supported managers to meet business and commercial demands on a changing business.
• Equipping elements of the organisation to better drive and manage post acquisition integration.