Wyndax Engineering Ltd (WEL) Case Study
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Wyndax Engineering Ltd (WEL) was established in July 2000 as a UK based Design firm with over 95% of its client base in Europe. WEL had begun implementing a strategy to extend its trade beyond the EU as a potential mitigation against any stalemate in the Brexit negotiations. This included a transition programme to move all systems and processes to Industry 4.0. In preparation for this, it plans the removal of all legacy systems in 2021 and to upgrade its software to cope with corporate governance on a global scale. From this arose an idea which grew into a feasible opportunity to extend its services to another sector and generate additional income.
A programme was broken down into individual projects which
included:
-
Safety
-
New systems implementation
-
Corporate governance, including approval of
corporate governance from regulatory bodies
-
New Market Development
-
Other enabling and enhancement work
-
Look at the human factor.
The programme manager was given the task of building a
robust business case for the programme, especially to ensure the New Market
Development (NMD) project would generate the maximum possible gain and extend
the operating life of WEL. It all called for careful planning, early
stakeholder engagement and finding the right people for the job.
Challenges
As well as solving the numerous technical challenges of
moving all its current applications to Industry 4.0, the programme team had to
demonstrate a strong financial and economic case for the programme. Regulators
and stakeholders had to be confident that the plan would not compromise safety,
security and environmental protection or affect business as usual and the
overall operating plan for WEL. There was also the question of re-energising staff
who had been expecting the firm to downsize as a result of Covid-19 and Brexit.
Many already had their minds set on severance or retirement, so were winding
down.
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Resources
The WEL Managing Director (Risha Patel) is the programme
sponsor, reporting to the site’s strategic management board. An experienced
senior project manager (Josephine Mensah) was given the role of
programme manager, with a project manager appointed for each of the individual
projects. The overall programme team involved 50 members of staff from project
managers to human resource personnel to production technicians. Although Risha
Patel is the MD, she is seriously concerned that if WEL shifts focus away from
its original target market, it may not be able to ‘cross the chasm’. The fear
from the board is that the company has done well in capturing the ‘early
adopters’ phase of the product life-cycle, but they are at risk of not
capturing the ‘early majority’. The technical team within WEL are at odds with
this strategy as they want to be part of the next big thing and change the
world, not “some big corporate that is only concerned about the bottom line”.
The strategy is clear, and 80% of the senior managers are aligned, although the
message has not reached either the middle management or the teams that are on
the ground.
Lessons learned
A lessons-learnt workshop is planned to be held at the end
of the programme lifecycle to identify what could have been done better as well
as what was done well and should be replicated for other projects. This will be
shared with other project managers across the firm and on the Kagnox ‘Lead and
Learn’ database. Among the main lessons taken from previous projects were the
benefits of early engagement with key personnel involved, keeping the safety
case simple to inspire confidence it could be delivered and relocating all team
members into a common building for consistency and ease of communication. Not
using the internal mailing system proved effective, too. Instead, documents were
physically delivered to engineers by the project team.
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