The Organisation:

Unison Ltd is a highly innovative manufacturing business based in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. They design manufacture and install tube bending equipment for a wide variety of customers and industries worldwide and have numerous Blue-chip clients in the Aerospace and Automotive sectors. As a leader in its field, Unison is constantly looking at how to deliver engineered solutions to customers, more effectively - to maintain its competitive position in the high-tech knowledge-intensive industrial sector.

The Challenge:

The MD of Unison Ltd - Alan Pickering - knows his customers don't need standard tube-bending machines; but instead need tailored technical solutions that solve their problems. Providing customers with tailored solutions usually means an organisation has to be extremely agile. Running an agile operation, that can adapt its approach in line with customer demand, means an organisation has to constantly cope with high levels of variation in the amount of work the business, and its different departments, need to handle. Unison Ltd was no different, and the issues they faced were how they could organise themselves and their operation to be effective whilst still providing the flexibility to meet the different demands of customers. Alan knew he'd have to look at the way his business worked, but recognised it wasn't something he could do himself, which is where he called upon The Excellence Partnership Ltd to help.

The Approach:

The company applied one of The Excellence Partnership's Improvement Frameworks to help it understand which areas of the operation needed attention, to create an effective agile business.

From the analysis three elements were identified:

1. How information from customers was captured, and translated into data that could be effectively utilised by the business.
2. The way the organisation planned and managed its resources in line with the variation in customer demand.
3. How the business was structured in terms of departments, as opposed to how it could be aligned to value streams.

Improvement teams were created in the business, and solutions developed for all three elements:

1. A simple process was created that allowed better alignment between customers' data and the needs of the technical team at Unison Ltd.
2. A new operations planning methodology was developed to allow the business to see and proactively manage its capacity against a variable load.
3. The organisation was restructured and key roles were developed to support the management of value streams.

The solutions have been implemented and the organisation has gone through a significant change in the way it operates and performs.

The Outcome:

Alan Pickering the Managing Director is very proud of the way his Company is evolving. Having a business that is more aligned to its customers and better able to plan and manage capacity against variable demand, puts the Operation in an excellent position for future growth. Unison Ltd has already seen a significant increase in demand for its technical solutions and machines and this programme has helped support that growth.

Alan the MD said, "The Excellence Partnership really got under the skin of the company quickly and soon identified the key challenges we had and put practical processes in place that helped us through a significant period of growth."

This programme provided the business with the ability to increase throughput - with no extra resource - by 18%, and it gave the business a return on investment of 30:1 in the first year.