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Driving IdeasIdeas move fast when their time has come.‘ When we had our firstcontacts with Celerantwe felt that the waythey operate is by goingdeep into the changeprocess, working on thementality in the companyand creating a sense ofurgency for change.’I also learned that LEAN is not a one-off project. The third success factor was changing the cultureOnce you start you’ll never stop. It’s Continuous and the mentality, and here I’m specificallyImprovement and this is what I now see happening talking about changing the management mentality.on the shop floor. People are driven and they’re We had to become more action driven, moregetting this extra motivation because they have disciplined and we also had to learn a lot morean impact on the process. My main concern about fact based decision making. We werehad been how would we keep this going after working a lot, doing a lot, but it didn’t alwaysCelerant left us? Now I see that my own people correspond to the three things I’ve just described.are very motivated and it is going very well.My main concern and my impact on this projectThe third thing that impressed me is what has been creating the sense of urgency. CreatingI would call the power of visualisation. We the awareness that there is a need for changehad no experience with a lot of the tools that and changing the operational clock speed, notCelerant brought us, so visualising all these only in the beginning to motivate people tothings was so powerful and effective for this get started, but also in how we continue thatprogramme. It also taught us how to better by doing things in a more effective way withvisualise our other plans and bring them to the a higher sense of urgency.floor. We worked very closely with Celerant andwhenever they asked for help or wanted usHow easy was it to bring themake a decision we immediately responded.Voice of the Customer deeperYou said that many people into the organisation?were set in their ways. Was To be honest, there are areas where we arestill struggling with that. The things we’veit difficult to change them? changed on the Supply Chain, they’ve workedIt was the major effort. Three things needed to well, but the Voice of the Customer has tohappen for the programme to be successful: come through our commercial people andthe first was convincing people there was an that’s one of the areas where I feel we mosturgent need for change - and that wasn’t easy have room for improvement. The wholewhen the company has been doing so well and programme worked well in the Operationspeople believed there was a direct relationship Department, but with Niko being the companybetween that success and how they did things. that it is, we were pretty much organised insilos. It was top down communication inThe second was transmitting our ambition most departments, with some bottom upand objectives to everyone. In the Operations communication in other departments, butDepartment it was clear that we wanted to there was very little communication betweenchange something, but the Operations Manager departments and that was something we hadneeded some help in defining and translating to break through. I think we only partlywhat exactly we wanted to achieve and how succeeded in doing that last year with thewe were going to achieve it.project. There’s more work to be done.28 CLOSEWORK® GLOBAL REVIEW 2012