The issue

  • Over a year behind plan due to technical difficulties and the inability to establish an effective delivery model
  • Significant efforts were made to find a workable engineering solution but continuing to fail in meeting planned delivery cycle times
  • Accruing significant non-recoverable costs on extending leases of expensive marine engineering plant
  • Accepted reality that most delays were either due to weather or one-off events and therefore non-addressable
  • Reliant on experienced agents, managers and foremen to manage communication without the need for much structure or formality
  • The aim was to achieve a repeatable 14-day ‘production’ cycle, from a starting point of 19 days as the demonstrated best achievement

Solution

Working with the project team to identify and implement:

  • An optimal production process with defined task times against which the project could plan, execute and measure performance
  • Introduction of cross-functional short-range planning discipline to improve visibility and reduce the instances of unplanned stoppages through poor communication and lack of coordination
  • Strengthening the cascade communications to the front-line teams to ensure the right plan was being executed
  • Prioritisation of the process improvement pipeline to accelerate the implementation of the highest impact solutions
  • Establishing adherence to a standard process and course-correcting back to the agreed sequence if unplanned events caused the deviation
  • Previously each cycle had effectively been ‘bespoke’
  • Using close monitoring to highlight avoidable downtime and to identify operational fixes, e.g deck layout standardisation

The results

  • Cycle time was compressed to less than the on-target 14-day sequence on a sustained basis, and as low as 10 days, with associated cost savings of ~£0.5m per cycle.

Having the Curzon team ‘embedded’ within the project proved effective in understanding the complexities and challenges of the operating environment. Pragmatic and tailored interventions and a ‘test and learn’ approach encouraged adoption and ownership.

An award-winning team

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