Scaling Best Practices across plants, regions and business units
For companies operating across several sites, the implementation of Best-Practice standards and the sharing of expertise across plants and regions represents a highly effective means of achieving and sustaining operational excellence.
While most companies recognize the importance of this objective, we observe that many organizations struggle to fully realize and sustain the potential benefits of their Best-Practice initiatives. The underlying reasons are typically linked to a limited number of recurring challenges.
Typical questions and challenges encountered in our projects:
- How can Best-Practice be identified, qualified, and agreed upon? What needs to be improved, how should it be measured, and what benefits can realistically be achieved through implementation?
- In operational areas such as production or maintenance, significant differences often exist between plants in terms of size, complexity, and performance levels. Simple replication or a "one-size-fits-all" approach rarely works in practice.
- How can organizations strike the right balance between global standardization and necessary local flexibility?
- How can compliance, implementation progress, and value realization be made transparent? How can cross-site collaboration and sustainable synergies be ensured?
- How can local entities be actively involved and engaged during the identification and development phases? What creates the “pull” for individual plants to adopt Best-Practice?
The H&C assessment and implementation framework
The Horn & Company approach addresses and resolves the challenges outlined above. To assess the current use of Best-Practice, strengthen their adoption, and unlock unrealized performance potential, we recommend the following key steps: Conduct a high-level assessment of operational performance across all sites and benchmark results against relevant internal and external peers. Key activities include: Evaluation of the Top-Down Performance Analysis and Benchmarking, and Identification of key plant similarities and differences. Group plants into clusters based on operational size, maturity, and performance characteristics. The objective is to establish clusters of sites that operate within similar performance ranges and therefore share comparable processes, challenges, and improvement levers. In many cases, nine clusters provide an appropriate level of differentiation. Based on the findings of the top-down assessments, conduct targeted analyses in selected focus areas. Examples include: The detailed H&C Best-Practice for processes, tools and organizational set-up for all key areas of Maintenance operations, helps identify improvement possibilities, and can be used to add or supplement the detailed recommendations regarding how and what practices to improve. Perform targeted assessments with the local teams on site to validate findings, collect additional insights, and build organizational commitment. Typical activities include: Typically, at least one maturity assessment should be conducted within each cluster to create transparency about organizational structures, processes, tools, and working methods that drive the performance observed in the top-down analysis. This bottom-up perspective validates identified improvement opportunities and supports the definition of realistic savings targets and implementation timelines. The implementation roadmap should be tailored to the findings of the previous phases. In addition to the identified improvement opportunities, our project experience consistently demonstrates the importance of strengthening the overall Maintenance System and establishing the following critical enablers and success factors:1. Top-Down Performance Analysis and Benchmarking
2. Plant Clustering
3. Deep-Dive Analyses and Augmentation with H&C Best-Practice
4. Bottom-Up Validation and Opportunity Assessment
5. Implementation Planning and Enablement
These points will also illustrate the necessity and benefits of sharing Best-Practice and help generate demand (a "pull effect") at local plants by demonstrating the added value for them.
Promoting the anchoring of the improvements as a new way to work
To ensure overall success and achieve and sustain Best-Practice maintenance, three main overarching levers need to be addressed from the start as part of the transformation.
The Management System
- Ensure alignment with overall key business drivers and targets
- Demonstrate potential of transformation (e.g. reduced equipment downtime and maintenance cost)
- Establish high-level Maintenance KPI and integrate in target-setting process for management
The Company Culture (social system)
- Engage all levels of employees
- Set up centralized and decentralized resources
- Trainings with „hands-on approach“ to generate early impact
- Use of „lighthouse“ assessments & implementations to share the benefits
The Maintenance System
- Develop a toolbox with „easy-to-implement“ blueprints for processes, tools, systems (for each improvement area)
- Create training materials and standards for technical Best-Practice (checklists, maintenance plans, shutdown plans etc.)
- Implement IT systems to support sharing of Best-Practice
Conclusion and Recommendations
Implementing and leveraging the significant potential of shared standards and Best-Practice is not inherently difficult. However, success requires a well-structured framework, disciplined execution, and considerable effort during implementation. Whether you have initial ideas or concrete plans, we listen, ask questions, and develop them further together. In a non-binding initial consultation, we clarify where you stand and how we can support you.Ready to take the next step?
