Context

As an executive and leader, I have held positions responsible for organizational leadership and development. I have created and executed new visions, policies, and strategic objectives to enhance operations to increase the organization’s ability to meet mission critical requirements and to improve management, operational effectiveness, customer service and profitability.

During my tenure at Gibson & Associates (UK) Ltd., I was responsible for leading a significant change management initiative for Textron Industrial Products Group (IPG). The objective of this initiative was to provide management consulting services for providing a comprehensive methodology and implementation to improve business practices, reduce and streamline costs, gain a common ground among a variety of corporate cultures, and develop and execute a new strategic direction.

Challenge

Textron is a $12 billion global industrial manufacturing conglomerate, with operations in the U. S., UK, Europe and Asia. The IPG organization consisted of 95 separate companies, operating in small groups of firms worldwide. The focus of most of these companies is on heavy manufacturing of industrial pumps and gears using massive amounts of metal in machining, casting and foundry operations. This approach to operations had created distinct management challenges, including inconsistent (or nonexistent) business processes and policies, an inability to manage organizational skills and information to manage supplier relationships, a variety of company cultures, which differed by country and geography, and the inability to leverage potential competitive advantages from suppliers. Management had taken preliminary steps in identifying the issues, and concluded that an emphasis on leadership, skills, policies and integration management was necessary to improve operations and long-term profitability. My challenge, in leading the change initiative, was to quickly validate earlier findings and determine if change could be accomplished effectively while keeping with organizational goals and objectives.

Action

• As the key executive tasked with leading the change initiative, I quickly developed a strategic plan of action to lead Textron IPG to a successful integration of business processes and practices, information management, and skills improvement. The plan began with developing a series of action items to assess the potential success of the change initiative.

• I began by creating a team of diverse (racial, ethnic, geographic and culture) consulting, manufacturing and logistics professionals, and devised an initial program plan, including potential cost estimates, deliverables and return on investment.

• Once the team was in place, I led several key sub-initiatives to ensure immediate and identifiable progress, including completing market research to identify key attributes of companies that would be targets for Textron IPG services, reached out to individual Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of client-companies to identify potential, mutual business opportunities, create executive level relationships, and gain agreement to proceed with the investment in time and funding to achieve Textron IPG’s goals for improvement.

• Working with multiple Textron IPG CEO's, Managing Directors and executive teams, I instituted a comprehensive communications plan to reduce conflict and manage expectations, and resolve issues across the program and the changing organizations. This plan included direct, personal communication with CEO’s and Managing Directors worldwide.

• As part of my leadership, I took a “hands on” role in managing the world-wide program with specific tactical responsibility for the 65+ client companies in Europe and the UK, including managing and delivering the project timeline for improvements and change management, budget and communications.

• As I led this particular part of the change initiative, I took personal responsibility to look at the interior workings of the organizations.   As a result, I determined that teams of manufacturing and logistics consulting professionals and client staff, teamed together could achieve the changes necessary within specific companies. This approach provided additional impetus to the timeline of the project, and gave ownership of the changes to the organizations, rather than a “top down” directed implementation.

• I was directly responsible for managing and leading a formal business transformation process that allowed for the creation of a supplier specifications document and the fair and honest selection of candidate supplier companies.

• As part of the change initiative, the identification of new suppliers (including metal, foundry, casting and transportation vendors) was critical to long-term success; failure of suppliers had contributed significantly to the challenges experienced by the previous organization.

• As part of my responsibilities, I managed the process of supplier selection and negotiations, resulting in early cost savings identified for the client.

• Finally, I managed and directed the creation and delivery of an education program that reached across the 95 organizations, recognized cultural differences, but created opportunities to gain support for alignment of business processes, provide skills training and ensure on-going client self-management and sufficiency.

Results

• Saved client company over $1.2 billion over three years

• Closed four major European manufacturing operations

• One example of savings was a 40% reduction in aluminum spend in one manufacturing plant

• Reduced number of worldwide suppliers from several thousands to approximately 200.

• Implemented consistent worldwide business process with trained, skills staff to execute process