KAESER compressors Austria is located in Linz and since many years a successful company. Besides selling and servicing of compressors they expand their product line by plant engineering and construction. In this case, plant construction means producing a turn-key container unit with compressed air stations, especially for oil production facilities in the Middle East. Therefore KAESER invests in infrastructure and process improvements.
With this background, MCG got commissioned to support these process improvements with the BigStep method. Before the BigStep workshop, MCG started a screening phase, which contained the conduction of qualitative interviews with the key players of the organization on the one hand and the analysis of the facts and figures on the other hand. This provided a good overview of the actual situation, which was then presented to the 25 participants to create the same level of knowledge (group consciousness).
The workshop itself was role-based (with debaters, critics and observers) non-hierarchical and focused on 6 topics within 2 days. The opening question of the workshop was: “What do we have to do to improve our order fulfillment process significantly within the next 12 months?”. The main topics were reduction of throughput time, increase of capacity and productivity, improvement of quality and cost reduction. Each topic was dealt with three times. In the first Session the group discussed the actual situation / the problem. I the second session objectives and strategies were defined and in the last round we worked on concrete measures and projects.
As a result we got a plan of around 30 improvement activities and projects for the six key topics communication process in project business, specification in engineering, human resource development and training, Quality assurance, project organization and steering, plant construction and assembly process, with concrete steps of implementation to ensure further growth.
Participants Feedback was very positive e.g.:
- Moderation was good; good mixture of participants
- Many different aspects were shown
- The enormous density of information at the workshop was incredible
- The 60 minutes session were very productive
- Different views of departments and persons were presented
- We realized how complex oil-business is
- The session memos were very fast at our disposal
- Good atmosphere throughout the workshop, moderators have led the process smoothly
- We could not have produced such a result without external support in such a short time.