The hidden route to operations excellence – engaging your team

This opportunity is hidden by traditional sourcing methods into traditional roles. There is much in the press about the roadblocks getting to growth and skills shortages and attracting the best into engineering and manufacturing and RETAINING them. The fact is that the UK is the 7th easiest place to do business in the World – so there are no excuses!

The underlying issues are these;

  1. is your organisation road worthy (the organisation structure can be likened as the vehicle to get from a-b)
  2. What is your workplace like to work in?
  3. How motivated / engaged are the team?
  4. how do you manage individual diversity?
  5. How effective is the team work?
  6. How do the team work together to deliver a successful outcome on time?
  7. How do you develop skills to achieve excellence?

In a technical environment

  • how well do you manage technical risk?
  • do you recognise the different challenge to manage technical teams
  • how well do you develop your technical capabilities, succession planning
  • how do you create agility with technical teams without compromising quality or motivation?
  • have you the design capability to design new products or just manage iterations?

Whilst companies complain about skills scarcity; very few engineering businesses measure engineering productivity or enable their teams to become more resourceful. So why are resources scarce?… Because these key skills are normally lightly managed and hardly developed.

Icebreaker have an interesting varied background; in this space for example we have led the establishment of these centres of excellence;

  1. the basis of an Aerospace Engineering Design Academy at Safran Group
  2. led Trend Controls to achieve CBI / Cranfield sponsored award for manufacturing
  3. led acclaimed manufacturing system solutions at Lucas Automotive / Nissan / Toyota

The icebreaker team have cut our teeth in traditional businesses for example UK automotive industry with Lucas (in the good old days), alongside FMCG Diageo, BAT etc.

Tom Icebreaker CEO adds; our passion to achieve excellence in engineering businesses is undiminished  It’s all about what is it like to work at your business if you wish to attract retain and develop the best. Engineering and manufacturing businesses serving critcal markets are where the sharpest skills are honed, you only need to look at Manganeze Bronze to see what happens if you get it wrong. That sort of failure in most organisations could be “managed through” in the market place, leaving the root cause unturned.

Pickering goes on to say – “Managing risk and achieving excellence is about getting everyone in the organisation adding significantly more value by thinking about what they are doing,  rather than being a component of a costly machine”