Kicking High-Performance Up a Notch

I was asked to visit a healthcare plant in Ireland as part of an acquisition integration. The acquired company had a variety of process and culture-change challenges.

This plant had great leadership engagement and well-qualified Lean practitioners on staff.  The challenges were to harmonize their site to the parent company and propel their operations excellence efforts to higher levels.  I didn’t want to make them go backwards just to learn the fundamentals of a different system.

I was able to align and accelerate the plant’s efforts using team-building methods and scientific problem-solving tools.  They learned to consistently use fundamental tools in an advanced way.   I trained and coached them in the Kaizen approach and showed them strategy deployment and project management methods. 

This location not only joined the parent company seamlessly, they became the Best Lean Plant (of 102 plants) two years in a row!  To this day the site consistently performs despite major market swings and customer changes.  The team has become self-sufficient and contributes to the success of affiliated sites in the region.