The Challenge
Unipart Consultancy was asked to design and implement a transformational change programme for one of the world’s biggest utilities company.
Tasked with embedding Operational Excellence (OpEx) throughout our customer, Unipart focused on building capability within teams to drive sustainable continuous improvement via workshops, in-the-line training, creative problem solving and coaching through one-to-one feedback and lean embedding measure audits (LEMs).
Our customer faced a number of external pressures from the regulator and other stakeholders, as well as internal issues. These gave rise to several explicit and implicit needs to raise the performance of the Repair Planning & Despatch process across all their networks. Customers were dissatisfied with job completion times and local government were also challenging the client on the duration of streetworks and overruns.
A worrying amount of time was being wasted on the re-work of daily plans, placing a high-workload on Network Supervisors. There was low confidence that plans were being created ‘right first-time’.
The Solution
Engagement sessions were held with Network Supervisors from all network areas to understand the issue. A weeklong kaizen event was held to understand the process and to identify the root causes of issues within the process. Representatives from all stages of the end-to-end process attended to provide insight and ideas for improvement that were built into a new process that applied the following design principles:
- Demand-driven
- Clear accountabilities and adherence to standard work
- 21-day planning cycle – planning methodology, underpinned by accurate reactive workload forecast – to ensure effective balance of demand and supply to generate a productive plan
- Process automation
- Performance monitoring – integration with Operational Excellence programme for post-day reviews; workplace audits and control matrix to provide assurance.
The Impact
Significant improvements were delivered in both customer service and productivity levels;
- 35% reduction in mean age of completed jobs, from 68 to 42 days
- 93% reduction in same-day changes to the resource plan by Network Supervisors
- 75% improvement in right-first-time planning
- Reduction of planning time by 1 hour a day per Supervisor (re-planning workload) to enable focus on value-add activities out in the field
- Increased OpEx practitioner capability by 16%
- The success of the project has led to the solution being rolled out to all network areas.