Productivity lift supports business-wide improvement agenda

Context

With a new business model, aggressive growth aspirations, and needing more skilled labour, our client knew lateral thinking would be pivotal to its continued success. The organisation had set its sights on significantly increasing the number and geographical spread of its assets while, at the same time, embarking on a new business strategy.

To support this ambitious and business-critical agenda, the leadership team trusted Minset to identify productivity improvements and reduce costs without compromising safety, community expectations, asset performance, or team culture.

Approach

Once on site, the team quickly assessed the client’s productivity baseline. The Minset team:

• Gathered data and insights using observations across various positions, including supervisors, control room operators, technical staff, planners, maintenance technicians and contractors.
• Executed two types of observation strategies to measure effectiveness and identify sources of waste. The team used DILO (Day in the Life Observations) for leadership and technical roles, and tool time (also called wrench time), best suited to operations and maintenance roles.
• Used a data-driven approach to identify and classify concerns and root causes so leaders could confidently plan and prioritise their actions.
• Worked closely with internal stakeholders to showcase which improvements, if implemented, would deliver a strong return on investment and support the organisation’s new business model.
• Identified a large number of smaller, more tactical and visible ‘quick wins’, which helped give the overarching business change program extra momentum and support.

As part of the overall solution, the team used Minobs, an innovative time use app to streamline workplace observations. The app helped Minset build a fast, accurate, and data-driven picture of how work was being performed by:

• Collecting hundreds of data points for each role in a single shift.
• Undertaking multiple observations of the same role across different crews.
• Identifying the many ‘hidden’ challenges workers faced as part of their roles, giving them a voice, and enhancing team member engagement and satisfaction.