Project: Accelerating economic results by launching a cross – functional improvement program.

Opportunity and project objectives

The client is an important manufacturing company with more than 1 Billion € in sales. The management team perceived the need to “translate” the company strategy in a clear list of improvement initiatives that would have helped to faster achieve the economic improvement targets. The company strategy was articulated in 4 pillars: 1. Customer centricity, 2. Product Cost reduction, 3. Process efficiency, 4. Valuable innovation

At the eyes of the management team the results to be achieved were clear:

1. Identify and prioritize the key initiatives with the highest economic impact or that were necessary to execute the strategy

2. Launch the initiatives coherently with the resources available

3. Help to build the capabilities and the context required to effectively execute the initiatives and to get measurable economic results faster

Project approach and decisions

Alyant helped the management team and the program leader during both the set up and the execution phases. The adopted approach was divergent at the beginning to stimulate the generation of new ideas and convergent in the following steps to ensure focus and energy only on few and high impact initiatives.

Fig 1: Key program phases

1. Idea generation:

• To generated new ideas on the potential initiatives, we organized and supported a series of work session that involved both the management team and the key stakeholders from the key functions involved

• We also launched an internal web survey that helped to further collect ideas and clarify the priority issues to solve

Fig 2: List of projects for prioritization (project names are illustrative to ensure data confidentiality)

2. Business case and prioritization:

• We build an evaluation model to prioritize the initiatives based on economic impact, risks, coherency with strategy etc.

• We than helped the team to select the top 3 initiative to start with (1 work – session)

3. Launch and planning

• We supported the set-up phase to ensure a strong alignment on results to be achieved (what), the key milestones (how) and the responsibilities (who)

• We activated a web based agile project management platform to improve efficiency and effectiveness during the execution

4. Execution and results monitoring

• Alyant actively supported the execution on 2 out of the 3 selected initiatives

• We helped the management team to launch a communication plan to the organization to create a sense of urgency on the results to be achieved

• We also helped to build monthly feed-back process towards the key project stakeholders based on results (KPI)

Results

• Higher focus on the initiatives with the highest impact (several initiatives that were on-going has been put on hold to reallocate resources on the priority ones)

• Higher Return on investment (ROI) and superior ability of the organization to deliver on improvement projects, recognized by the management team

For more information please contact us at info@alyant.it