Kaman Aerospace UK is a subsidiary of US based Kaman Aerospace. The business was struggling to achieve its profit plan and the UK team requested help from Bourton Group to focus the business on achieving Sales and Gross Margin targets.
A team was formed from a combination of staff from the US staff and UK. The US team however felt they needed some extra ‘local’ resource who could help them to better understand the culture and ways of working.
The three strands of work were handled as separate work streams.
Structure – How will the OP Ex team interact with rest of the factory? How will we review progress?
Discipline – How will we migrate to a more sustainable model?
Project Management – the project manager established a process for the team to follow with benefits tracking associated to each Improvement project and mapped against a policy Deployment Matrix.
Weekly meetings checked progress against target and daily calls between UK and US for updates, ensured the team stayed focussed on the outputs and objectives TSS (Task, Scope, Status) sheet for their project.
A project structure was put into place and included setting up sub projects that focused on performance improvement in terms of sales and gross margin.
A war room was set up and with a stand-up weekly review.
Culture Audit – To baseline the culture, we held 14 focus groups covering senior management to shop floor sampling over 25% of the workforce to determine their perception of the current and desired culture for KCUK.
This also highlighted areas management needed to pay attention to regarding, rewards, recognition, communications and first line leader roles.
The audit was re-run nine months later to check progress and areas to refocus the leadership team. The audit showed progress on communications, but work was still required on recognition.
Organisation Redesign – The organisation structure was mapped against the core processes to check gaps and overlaps.
The key areas were identified as programme management, business development and supply chain which have now been addressed.
Key improvements were made by looking at the Gross Margin products which needed to improve and focus on them first. Plants were re-laid, contracts were reviewed, and customers were approached for price increases (and received), quality data analysis was undertaken and initiatives were put in place to reduce scrap across a range of products.
By the end of the first six months, significant increases to the bottom line had been achieved (>£1.3m annualised improvement).
We worked with the top team to show them how the programme management process was set up, so they could continue running it after our time with them.
To date they are still running with the approach and continuing to make improvements.
Over the life of the project we identified over 25 opportunities that were converted into improvement projects, all aimed at reducing costs and or increasing Gross Margin, some by up to 50% improvement.
Kaman greatly appreciates the efforts that the Bourton Team has provided to Project OPEX as you have assisted in putting Kaman in the proper alignment for increasing the margins on our programs.
Thanks for everything; it has been a pleasure working with Bourton Group on project OPEX.