The company case ABB Trafo, a Spanish company of the Swedish-Swiss business group Asea Brown Boveri, explains in this article what has been the experience of the recent implementation of a Process Reengineering Project as a Change strategy and a key competitive factor.
The ABB Trafo transformer factory in Zaragoza had always distinguished itself for its national prestige and for its technologically competitive product.
However, it had set ambitious growth targets from which the domestic market it was targeting was not sufficient. This is why ABB Trafo decided to expand its market by offering its cutting-edge products to the European market.
This required initiating a process of rapid change in those aspects where the new situation would most affect: Production capacity.
New demands on the product.
New production cycles and delivery times.
The challenge of opening up to the European market meant looking for new action strategies.
For this reason, ABB Trafo decided to change the usual trajectory maintained up to now within the framework of Continuous Improvement and Total Quality Processes to start an ambitious Process Reengineering Project.
" The leap we had to make was very important, a Continuous Improvement was not applicable, the changes had to be drastic and in a very short time," explains Joaquín Lancis, Head of the Reengineering Project and current Customer Focus and Supply Manager.
After a year of effort, the change experienced in ABB Trafo was overwhelming, reorganizing the work in the workshop paid off:
Manufacturing cycle times were reduced from 15 to 7 days.
The "work in progress" was also reduced.
"Each worker controlled their minimum stock, which allowed having only the necessary stock and therefore substantially reducing the cost of production."
Employees stressed that there was more freedom to discuss the best way to do a job, that improvements were sought for everyone and that there was more information.
On the other hand, the attitude of the staff was more positive, the level of motivation went up and there was greater cooperation and productivity.
The improvement achieved was such that today ABB Trafo is the focus of the ABB Group, which considers and requires them to be a model factory.
