Case Study Overview: Anglian Water, Service Excellence

The Opportunity

Anglian Water, a leading water services company in the UK, wanted support in their mission to continuously improve efficiency and effectiveness in Water Provision, Water Recycling Operations and their Customer Service Centres.

‘Love Every Minute’ was adapted from the corporate brand of ‘Love Every Drop’ and devised to create a culture of delivering small, incremental improvements in daily work based on Lean, Six Sigma and Customer Service Excellence techniques.

Training, certification and project delivery using Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques generated an incredibly successful culture change, encouraging a mindset of identifying and understanding root cause operational problems and seeking ways to resolve them. In order to drive employee engagement, these skills were passed on to all levels of the organisation, generating collaborative working across organisational boundaries to improve how things are done.

Change Drivers:

• £15 million sustainable cost reduction in operational expenditure by 2017/18
• PR19 Setting of the price, investment and service package that customers receive.
• Market Reform – Water 2020 (from April 2017, all non-household customers across England and Scotland were able to buy their water and water recycling services from any retailer).
• Greater return on investment (ROI) for the owners who are pension funds and long-term infrastructure investors and fund managers
• Increasingly competitive utility market place dominated by experienced utility providers looking to gain increased market share and competitive advantages

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The Solution

Four Lean Six Sigma courses were designed from existing ChangeWise training and tailored with industry specific examples to suit the client’s content requirements. These were then branded and white-labelled to match the corporate communication brand values, and delivered as an in-house deployment. The courses were designed to work best with a cross-section of different staff from all teams within the business’ core delivery and support functions, along with all areas of its geography to encourage collaboration:

Four Key Courses:

1. Supporter: Use of basic Lean techniques to focus on improving personal efficiency
2. Enabler: An overview of the Lean tools for front line/team managers to plan how they will role-model and develop a continuous improvement culture in their teams
3. Practitioner: Focused on depth and breadth of Lean and Six Sigma tools for people in key business change roles to facilitate change.
4. Optimiser: Optimiser staff learn to use basic Lean and Total Productive Maintenance techniques to maximise efficiency of their operational assets.

To further enhance Lean successes, additional support tasks included:

• Director consultation on candidate selection
• Welcome invites and pre-course reading
• Course outlines, webpages, online learning management system courses (LMS),
• E-learning for basic Lean Awareness,
• Welcome video to position the philosophy
• Workbook design and printing
• 3-month follow-up & Yammer community
• LCS certification and coaching for Practitioners
• Ways of Working coaching for Enablers

The Result:

• 2-year Lean education programme covering over 20% (~1200 attendees) of the workforce to drive a lean six sigma culture focussed on driving out waste, simplifying processes, optimising organisational structures, collaboration and a ‘right first time’ mindset.
• 71 courses and 140 days of training delivery creating capability in the identification and delivery of service and efficiency improvements
• Accreditation of Practitioner training to the Lean Competency System (LCS), the only UK authority qualified to certify lean training for content and quality
• 220 Practitioners delivering targeted Lean projects to embed their learning and attain LCS Level 1c certification
• 100+ Practitioners certified to date with benefits totalling millions
• Whole company using Lean methodology for delivering incremental savings in efficiency and service as a long-term cultural change not just an ‘optional’ initiative
• Common lean improvement approach
• Director involvement in courses and communication to delegates
• Significant benefits across all business drivers (customer, compliance, company, colleague and community)
• Inclusive offer to all staff and partner organisations
• Service Incentive Mechanism (SIM) qualitative survey based on customers’ satisfaction with their service for 2017/18, demonstrated organisation-wide improvement in performance leading to first place in the league table of water and sewerage companies scoring 4.52 out of 5 and top in the ‘Best Places to Work’ list for 2018

Client Feedback:

ChangeWise have provided learning and development services in a business wide programme of Lean deployment. Delegate evaluations have verified the excellent standards of their structured training in both providing engagement and understanding. The ChangeWise approach appeals to all levels of the organisation from director to front line staff, demonstrating a strong level of relate-ability and credibility in their offering. As a professional in the same field I have found ChangeWise to be a good sounding board for ideas and concepts, with an enthusiastic willingness to collaboratively work towards achieving our business goals. It is clear from working with ChangeWise that they are outstanding industry professionals who also care about delivering to client need, this emotional investment combined with pragmatic adaptable approach distinguish them out from the “consultancy pack”.’

Louise Copper, Head of Business Process Improvement & Delivery

Interested in looking at how Lean can help your organisation drive service excellence? Contact us at info@changewise.co.uk and let’s talk about how we can help.

ChangeWise believes employee engagement is the foundation for successful Change. Training and coaching your people to use simple continuous improvement techniques will enable your organisation to continuously adapt and stay ahead in a constantly changing and challenging environment.

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