14 May 2008
MCA platinum win for Quest Worldwide
Manufacturing company saved from the brink.
Global management consulting firm, Quest Worldwide, was recently named overall winner, Platinum Award, in this year’s Management Consultancies Association (MCA) Management Awards in association with business magazine, Management Today (see Figure 1, below).
Figure 1. Platinum Award Winners, Quest Worldwide with MCA President Hugo Were (far left) and Declan Curry, BBC Business journalist and host of the evening (far right)
Quest’s work for automotive supplier TMD Friction Group helped TMD jump from a distressed status to profitable growth within a year. Quest introduced a top-to-bottom overhaul and guided senior executives in developing and executing a 1-page business plan.
Bound for bankruptcy, TMD needed to double profitability, improve customer service, introduce new products faster, reduce inventory and rationalize manufacturing. Since Quest arrived, TMD has seen sales growth rise 11%, new business wins increase from 40% to 70% and profits go up by 20%.
Merger failure
TMD was a private-equity buyout gone wrong – a merger of 2 firms that were still working independently. Manufacturing plants in the UK, Germany, Sweden, France, Spain, Italy, the US, Mexico, Brazil and China all had different histories, practices and attitudes.
Global projects were hard to manage across country fiefdoms, and head office '3-piece suits' were perceived as distant, mistrustful and autocratic.
Global projects were hard to manage across country fiefdoms, and head office “3-piece suits” were perceived as distant, mistrustful and autocratic. Customers valued TMD’s products, but found the company slow and inconsistent.
“The cultural task was huge,” admits Detlev Spanholz, TMD’s senior vice-president for quality and customer satisfaction. “Everything was different – not just systems and practices, but the underlying business philosophy of the original companies.”
TMD had tried modern techniques like kaizen, the Japanese continuous improvement philosophy, but they did not stick.
Creating a culture of continuous improvement
Richard Cox, principal consultant, Quest Worldwide (pictured, right), is the program manager for rolling out continuous improvement across TMD. TMD’s small communication function focuses on external communication and so internal communication became integrated in the change process through the program office.
Cox explains that during 2006, TMD’s refinancing was the main topic for the senior team. “It was a struggle to get them to think about their internal communication,” Cox says. “But we did get the communication SVP to lead a program of monthly team briefing, which is now well established through the organization’s 15 sites.”
Communication is key
Quest sees communication as one of the key enablers of change. Cox says leaders demonstrating role model behavior is a key success factor – and effectiveness in team communication is critical.
Cox believes “leadership and getting commitment” is the most vital change enabler, followed closely by “setting direction through goals”.
Communication without direction is not effective, but neither is setting direction without effective communication.
Maintaining progress
TMD is currently introducing an intranet to share experiences across the company, but Cox thinks team communication boards are more empowering. “Sharing best practice is a real challenge but communication boards facilitate this process.”
The company’s annual planning process will sustain the changes and Quest will also undertake a fitness review to assess how well the program is working. “This is scored against the external Business Excellence Model,” Cox explains. “It allows us to compare with external indicators and is being introduced into TMD this year for the annual business cycle in August-September.”
Quest trains senior managers to undertake diagnostic reviews for themselves. Each MD, with a team of 3 or 4, will review a sister factory. The sister factory’s senior team will set the plan for the following year, informed by this process. “That’s how we make sure it’s sustained – it’s integral,” Cox says.
Business reality
He believes such major change programs should be self financing in the first year. “It has to be business real and deliver money to the bottom line.”
Regarding Quest’s platinum win, Cox says, “It’s a measure of how well the company has taken the program on board. It’s been greater than our change management efforts, but there’s no doubt we provided the glue to hold things together.”
By the end of March TMD had trained 76% of its 4,000 target audience and Quest is now helping to introduce the “working team leader” initiative to 12 target sites. Check out the full story in the Hub article Quest's "working team leader" initiative.
Have your say
In this program “communication” became an integral part of the program office. Do you think this is an effective approach – or would you prefer to see communication run out of a specialist communication department?
Discuss these issues with other comms practitioners by joining the Internal Comms Hub members' group on the Communicators' Network.
Other recommendations:
Quest's "working team leader" initiative
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