LARGE SCALE strategic initiatives - expertise

A leading global manufacturing company recognised that they had no unified business-to-business platform, with multiple ERP systems difficult to maintain, limited standards and limited visibility connected to multiple locally built online web shops with minimal standards. Combined with an inconsistent varying structure and transaction processing across Europe.

Early milestones in the strategic initiatives showed signs of slippage, with muted concerns being aired amongst the business leaders and confusion within Regional Director community that the Programme outcomes were unclear across the business and deemed as not a priority whilst the key focus was to maintain price margins and market share on a day-to-day basis and keep the existing Customer base satisfied within highly competitive markets across Europe.

Early progress of the overall implementation plan was thwarted by regular re-planning caused by changes to scope and local conditions being uncovered which were determining changes to the roadmap of the roll-out.

With many dependencies to manage including an offshore testing teams, legal, IT suppliers, the Business and Customers not forgetting multiple translations into local languages.

A globally recognised leading building materials supplier acquisition of an organisation with a leading position in the UK/Europe would almost double their revenue, employees which and inhert a large pool of talent and experience as well as increasing its network from 30 to 50 countries. 

In an era of globalisation, scale matters and with a model the necessary drive would produce significant efficiencies through global standardisation of processes, organisation and systems. 

Combined with an emphasis on Production excellence the Company's philosophy was a commitment to deliver a consistently high quality service to Customers.

In order to become more Customer driven the company transformation strategy objective was to replace 22 Sales/Distribution offices across the UK with 6 Customer Service Excellence Centres in order to maximise the benefits of post acquisition.

The complex multi million pound Programme involved multiple work streams including Strategic Planning, IT infrastructure, Commercial, Business Process, Human Resources, Communications and Training to name a few! 

During turbulent trading conditions the global producer of construction related products  (Total: 600+ operations) announced an ambitious 5 year major company transformation strategy programme of change to the stock exchange of their vision as a company to transition to an integrated business committed to achieving a multi million overhead saving.

The visionary leaders recognised that restructuring a Company is a complex process and were aligned on the following:

1. Employee Uncertainty & resistance

2. Talent Loss & Knowledge Drain

3. Operational Disruptions

4. Legal & Compliance Impact

5. Customer & Market Impact

6. Financial Strain

7. Cultural Shifts

Through a structured Communications Strategy Framework Leaders and regional operations were fully aligned throughout the programme lifecycle and aware of all decisions being made ensuring all levels of the organisation could contribute and had the opportunity to highlight local conditions and nuances that would need to be considered as an exception across the entire organisation. 

A global leader in design and manufacture within the automotive industry within it’s specialist field wished to improve the throughput of products delivered, reduce the build hours, and thus provide the opportunity to create greater turnover, profit, and a competitive advantage whilst driving quality and compliance.  

Work was often being completed out of stage resulting in undesirable effects such as a high volume of concessions with no formal procedures being adhered to resulting in offline shortages and incomplete work, leading to time delays and increased lead times.

Training roll-out of new ways of working, process and visual measure in order to each support function leadership ensured sustainability strategic initiatives with the key focus on improving the flow of the system resulting in the improved consistency of line moves within the production line, reduced lead times, working on the right things at the right time, fully trained staff, quality improvements and increased throughputs.

A leading high street bank recognised that they wish to expand on the early design work completed by implementing a further phase of additional common processes through their branch network, telephony centres and digital channels.

There was a desire to making further channel choices available to Customers and Colleagues with simpler routine transactions namely straight through processes whilst reducing the number of touch-points per transaction in order to improve Customer experience through offering more channel choice at FPOC and importantly improve Colleague effectiveness through the company transformation strategy.

By operating across the same platform this allowed Branch and telephony Colleagues to be fully aligned with the Customer experience and able to resolve any queries in the first instance without any need to re-direct for resolution.

A division of a leading UK building materials producer with a strong mineral asset base viewed their merchant sector products as a commercial add-on to high volume, lower margin work. 

There were significantly different approaches to the market within each of the six regional structures. 

However, it was also recognised that there was high potential for the Company to increase its share through effective competition within the £500m market.

A structured Future State Operating Model was evaluated by the Company Board members and approved and the company transformation strategy was formed.

The structured approach would result in early challenges being faced to the existing Customer base, development of Customer strategies, operational impacts and changes to systems and processess during the transition. 

UK based Financial Services Company which provides pensions, life insurance, investment products and retirement planning recognised that  existing systems were becoming problematic due to increased downtime and unreliability which was impacting the processing of Customer requests more frequently. They were aligned in the need to complete the strategic initiative as part of a wider company transformation strategy.

The major banking group had to respond to new regulations focussing on compliance of personal data from a records management perspective, ensuring each banking system containing personal data and/or critical conduct records were remediated, if required.The strategic initiative formed part of a wider company transformation strategy specific to GDPR compliance.

A builders merchant wished to increase warehouse capacity in order to accommodate a growing flow of work from Goods In to Despatch whilst improving productivity and increasing their OTIF (On-Time, In Full) deliveries as part of a series of strategic initiatives. The leadership team recognised that there was a need to make urgent layout changes in order to promote a highly productive operation through leading measures.

A leading construction supplier had no consistent method of capturing Customer data resulting in a lack of support for its Commercial teams in order to collaborate more effectively staff and support data driven decisions. As part of a group-wide company transformation strategy the system and consequent behaviour change for all related Commercial staff was undertaken.

A UK distributor’s Managing Director had a vision of increasing the Company’s product offering with an OTIF always greater than 98%  together with a highly productive workforce it was recognised that there was an urgent need to improve the efficiencies within the Operation as part of their wider strategic initiatives programme.

A market leading retailer’s National Distribution Centres and other key Distribution Centres were not operating on the same technology platforms in order to efficiently utilise the Transport Management System (TMS) this work formed part of their overall strategic initiatives programme.