Eleven sites, one way of doing things

The situation

Belmont had grown by acquisition. Eleven plants across four countries, nine of them bought rather than built, and every one still running the process it had on the day it was acquired.

Group finance could not compare them. Each site reported unit cost on a different basis, so the "most efficient" plant changed depending on who was preparing the numbers. Meanwhile the same component was being made three different ways, at costs that varied by 40%.

What made it hard

Not the process design. The obstacle was that each plant manager had spent a decade optimizing their own operation and was, locally, correct. Any centrally imposed standard would make at least four sites demonstrably worse, and those four managers knew it.

Standardization programs usually fail because the people being standardized are the only ones who understand what they will lose.

What we did instead

We did not design the standard. We ran a six-week exercise where the eleven plant managers designed it together, using a common cost baseline we built first so the argument had shared facts underneath it.

The baseline was the real work. Four weeks measuring the same eleven things across eleven sites, consistently, for the first time in the company's history. Once everyone could see the same numbers, three of the eleven processes turned out to be clearly better and the debate shifted from whose was best to how quickly the rest could adopt them.

Roll-out

We piloted at the second-worst performing site rather than the best, because a standard that only works where things already go well proves nothing. It took eleven weeks and was messier than planned.

The remaining nine sites went live over five months, and from the third onwards a Belmont plant manager led each roll-out rather than us.