The Consortium met in March for their second visit to Wales. The first being a visit to the Shingo Award winning refinery at Vale Swansea. On this second occasion the consortium were visiting Dwr Cymru. This visit however, had the bonus of exploring two sites, the first being Cog Moors which is a typical Asset Management environment, while the second was at their Linea site, which is the retail section of Dwr Cymru which is the typical service/office environment.
The purpose of the visit by the team was to cast an eye over Dwr Cymrus’ Lean Programme and business overview, and examine their current continuous improvement journey, exploring the requirement for a sustainable CI journey in greater detail.
At the start of the day, Mat Jackson, Jackie Gray and John Bowd, firstly introduced the host Dwr Cymru. They then introduced the CI journey for Dwr Cymru at the high level from its very beginning. Jackie then focused on introducing the Cog Moors case
They highlighted the importance of genuine people engagement, and explained how an end-to-end study of the sludge supply chain has taken place to underpin the diagnosis ahead of designing the journey in detail. To finish they then explained the roadmap creation and maturity assessment.
After this the team then set off on the road to visit Cog Moors to gain first-hand knowledge of this case study.
The site manager John Bowd led the tour and showed the team around the process where various operators also took active part in the tour and answered questions. They also demonstrated the level of engagement across the site. The team observed the CLS boards (dashboards) and standard work across the site. Also SOP’s, 5S and problem solving techniques were socialised.
Then, it was on to the second visit of the day for the team, and their visit to the Linea site, which is the retail side of Dwr Cymru in Cardiff. Here the retail team presented their roadmap for improvement, and in depth discussions took place regarding the difficulties, challenges, opportunities and potential pitfalls of change in the service environment.
We’ve published this summary of the visit to Wales, and have inserted some of the images from this visit below. However, for confidential reasons we are unable to publish the full outcome/results of the visit to Dwr Cymru. If you are interested in finding our more about the Lean & Sustainable consortium you can visit the Lean Consortium web page.
