Making a rapid, sustained improvement to a business is not a passive event – it takes significant time and effort from both parties. It is important to recognize that neither business can succeed without the other, and that both businesses need to operate in close partnership.
B&N Europe is very results focused. It’s a defining nature of ours, and we only recruit individuals with a track record of real success, who have been instrumental in implementing improvement within manufacturing businesses, and know and understand the pressures of line management. We each still have that passion for improvement that makes the eyes shine bright, and are fortunate enough to have an approach, process and toolkit that makes a real difference very quickly. Nonetheless, we must stress that the people who make the real changes, who fix the problems, and make the lines run better with less waste are the people who run the machines day in day out – not us. We train, help, coach, mentor, demonstrate, cajole, break down barriers, and generally do whatever is needed to set the improvement free. And we leave the skill to repeat the process – so once a site has lived the experience of rapid improvement, it is ready to do it again and again, without our help a second time.The sustainability of the results is entirely driven by the local management – B&N will install the necessary systems and processes, but without a local management to apply and use them, no improvement would take place. B&N is also particular about not acting as the line-management – if we do that, the results aren’t genuinely sustainable, so unless there is an exceptional, short term need, we make sure that the local management lead and own the improvement process themselves, and they should be recognized and rewarded for the success of a program.Partnership principles, and a governance process ensures that both businesses work closely and successfully together – exactly how this looks depends on how many sites the organisation has, over how many countries; The governance for a 100+ site multinational blue chip manufacturer looks quite different to that of a single site privately owned business – but B&N has a track record with the full range, and will use the most appropriate process.
Success for both businesses should be aligned, and that means that B&N prefer to operate under a performance guarantee, sharing risk and operating on the risk reward principle. To enable B&N to make this guarantee, we conduct a short assessment first that defines the size of the prize, the estimated recoverable time frames, and outlines the required activity and guaranteed amounts and ratios. This all takes about a week (depending on the size of the site), but depending on your region, sector, and when you wish to start, you may be eligible for a guaranteed return on the assessment itself, or for some or all of the fee to be waived in the first instance.
We love doing and talking about improvement – even if you don’t think you’d want an assessment or a program, don’t be shy about giving us a call – if we’re in your location anyway, we’d be happy to spend a couple of hours walking a site with you, and simply giving a few pointers of the right way to go forward, no cost, no commitment.
