The issue
- Over a year behind plan due to technical difficulties and the inability to establish an effective delivery model
- Significant efforts were made to find a workable engineering solution but continuing to fail in meeting planned delivery cycle times
- Accruing significant non-recoverable costs on extending leases of expensive marine engineering plant
- Accepted reality that most delays were either due to weather or one-off events and therefore non-addressable
- Reliant on experienced agents, managers and foremen to manage communication without the need for much structure or formality
- The aim was to achieve a repeatable 14-day ‘production’ cycle, from a starting point of 19 days as the demonstrated best achievement
Solution
Working with the project team to identify and implement:
- An optimal production process with defined task times against which the project could plan, execute and measure performance
- Introduction of cross-functional short-range planning discipline to improve visibility and reduce the instances of unplanned stoppages through poor communication and lack of coordination
- Strengthening the cascade communications to the front-line teams to ensure the right plan was being executed
- Prioritisation of the process improvement pipeline to accelerate the implementation of the highest impact solutions
- Establishing adherence to a standard process and course-correcting back to the agreed sequence if unplanned events caused the deviation
- Previously each cycle had effectively been ‘bespoke’
- Using close monitoring to highlight avoidable downtime and to identify operational fixes, e.g deck layout standardisation
The results
-
Cycle time was compressed to less than the on-target 14-day sequence on a sustained basis, and as low as 10 days, with associated cost savings of ~£0.5m per cycle.
Having the Curzon team ‘embedded’ within the project proved effective in understanding the complexities and challenges of the operating environment. Pragmatic and tailored interventions and a ‘test and learn’ approach encouraged adoption and ownership.
An award-winning team
