Rockford and Sharing in Growth have been working together on transforming Rockford for four years, and in that time we’ve learned a lot about the difficulties of executing our best ideas.

When new vision, mission and values are fully embedded into the business, you’d expect that a complete business transformation would naturally follow suit from there. But it’s not quite that simple.

Execution of the new ideas can often be quite difficult, as many individual processes often need to be overhauled in order to succeed. Sometimes that comes with a huge change of technology or business practices, but other times we’re talking about tiny details that can take years to iron out completely.

With Rockford, we’re dealing with a lot of new changes, and some changes are more effectively embedded than others. The SiG team have seen many occasions when they had hoped that changes were properly integrated, only to see them disappear with the end of a certain project. It’s been a learning process for everyone involved, including senior management, production teams and the SiG team themselves.

The Difficulty with Execution of Transformational Change

It seems that many organisations underestimate the complexity of changes required to effect total transformation. With Rockford, we had updated standard operating procedures, trained relevant staff members in new processes, and the senior management had a good idea what had been put in place. Training programs had been instigated at every level to improve lean processes, production planning, communication, finance, and more. And yet, when it came down to it, the changes hadn’t fully stuck and things fell apart.

One of Rockford’s core projects had originally been running at a loss due to unforseen inefficiencies. The SiG team applied lean methodology to every single step of the production process and managed to reduce the project from 400 hours to 75 hours. SiG representatives also helped our estimators to rework the cost model and ensure the project was priced properly. The team was running daily and weekly profitability analysis, so they knew exactly how things were going. Within 12 months, that project had made a £695k cost benefit, which got the attention of senior management at both Rockford and SiG, hailing the programme as a success.

SiG then changed focus to other beneficiaries of the programme, and suddenly it was clear that the changes that had been made at Rockford weren’t ingrained beyond the previous project. Even though it looked like fantastic transformation, it wasn’t complete.

So over the next 12 months, SiG and Rockford are working very closely to ensure that everything SiG has taught us has been embedded thoroughly. We’re nominating champions for different elements of the transformation, and developing a top-to-bottom process for transparent communication, ensuring everyone knows what they need to achieve and how that will be accomplished.

SiG is setting Rockford up for the future, ensuring we have the capabilities and resources in place to continue evolving towards success. We’ve implemented lean efficiencies into every stage of our operations, from costing and procurement, to production and management practices.

We look forward to a bright future.

Rockford

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