Case Studies

Products/Services
Tele Atlas (a division of TomTom)
Tele Atlas, an industry pioneer in digital mapping and geographic data focused on product simplicity as a way to increase its long-term value. The issue was that product variations (i.e., SKUs) had multiplied and customer tailored applications had increased in complexity. In response, a global production platform was developed to reduce redundancy of product capabilities and the total number of products and process costs. The migrated products were discontinued, outsourced, switched, or charged as an add-on service. Results achieved included reducing the number of products by 80% in 100 days. The company retained 89% of its North American revenue through eight standard products, significantly reducing production costs.

Processes
Johnson & Johnson – Ethicon
J&J Ethicon’s supply chain process was overly complex resulting in late shipping and unsatisfied customers for one of its key products, Prolene. Ethicon leveraged the WorkOut approach to help focus the organization on simplification of the supply chain. They set a WorkOut goal of maintaining average production of 1.2 million items of Prolene per week versus the 850,000 they were currently producing. Post WorkOut implementation focused on elements such as line item fill rates, inventory redirection, having the right metrics but not too many, reducing back orders, and increasing production capacity. The WorkOut exceeded its goal reaching 1.3 million items per week. In addition, line item fill rates increased to 97%, up from 80-87%.

New York City Hospital
A New York City hospital sought ideas to free up the capacity of nurses to focus on higher priority clinical interventions. One initiative focused on a maternity unit where significant nursing time was being devoted to basic patient care activities such as taking ice, diapers, and burping cloths to patient rooms instead of administering pain medication or teaching new mothers how to breast feed. The initiative set a goal to decrease call bell response time by 50% and decrease the number of calls by 50% on a mother baby floor. Specific innovations to achieve the goal included stocking the rooms with high demand items and changes in education/communication with new patients. The team met both of its goals to reduce call bell response time and the number of patient calls which resulted in a dramatic increase in Press Gainey scores.

Managerial Behavior
Grupo Industrial Saltillo (Mexican Conglomerate)
Grupo Industrial Saltillo manages businesses in three segments: building materials, metals and automotive, and house wares. The perceived diversity and differences of these business segments among the executive team resulted in little cross-segment collaboration. Each leader would manage his or her business individually and come together once per month for a typical state of the business meeting. Even then, the executives did not feel comfortable sharing their views with each other as they felt their business segments were too different from one another. A new Co-CEO challenged the way the executive team managed their businesses. Rather than meeting once a month, the new Co-CEO brought the executive team together once every other week for two hours. In these sessions executives were encouraged to discuss opportunities for improvement (work problems together, co-develop strategy, etc.). In addition, the expectation was set that each senior leader would coach his peers on how to make improvements in their respective business segments. As a result, the businesses became simpler to manage and more productive.