IT directors should move from managing periods of
discrete change to a culture of continuous improvement, Bob
Hawkins, IT strategy manager at Ford Europe, told last week's IT
Directors Forum.
"We should not be thinking in terms of 'either-or', such as
revolutionary versus evolutionary, or radical versus incremental,
or disruptive versus continuous," he said. "Radical change without
continuous improvement results in decay of any achievement until
the next radical change.
"Radical process innovations are not sustainable without the
foundations of a culture of continuous improvement."
Ford adopted this approach for the revamp of its order fulfilment
system, a major ongoing process reorganisation that started in 1999
and which, over the past two years, has entered its final
phase.
"Process innovation can take time," said Hawkins. "The next
silver bullet does not work unless you are getting the right
environment to get that change in place."
Ford's new Europe-wide system has resulted in a single order
pipeline, jointly managed across the sales, marketing and
production divisions.
Dealers were closely involved in the project, and the system has
enabled the number of cars built to order to rise from 20% to 50%.
The time taken to build to order has been cut from between 45 and
90 days to between 15 and 30 days.
There is also now a greater than 70% reliability that a delivery
promise can be kept, whereas before that metric was unknown,
Hawkins said.
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