Interviews

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Europe’s leading and largest ever, brand-heavy meeting place for process excellence practitioners

Over the past 15 years, LEGO has achieved what has come to be appreciated as the greatest U-turn in corporate history. In 2004 the Danish-born company was drowning in $800m of debt and was being hit by a 30% loss in sales year-on-year.

Despite being arguably the most recognizable toy brand on the planet, 50 years on from it’s inception the plastic brick-maker was struggling to stay afloat in the midst of a rapidly changing market. Verging onto bankruptcy, something had to change.

With the appointment of new CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp that same year, LEGO underwent a transformation that radically rebuilt the core business, brick by brick. By 2005, the company had turned its first profit in two years, it quadrupled its return between 2008 and 2010 and in 2015 it announced profits of $660m. Key to this transformation was the implementation of a culture of continuous improvement that had the strength and longevity to keep up with the company’s unprecedented growth.

Here, we share essential insights from Peter’s 28-years of experience in the change sphere and his personal building blocks for continuous improvement.

It is becoming increasingly clear that enterprise-wide collaboration is a critical ingredient for success. With insight from Katie McConochie, Senior Director of Process & Change at Inmarsat and our research from our recent benchmarking report, this new interactive content piece explores:

• Why 90% of OPEX leaders believe business units should have more involvement in the business transformation process
• How to create a relationship between OPEX and business units that emphasises collaboration
• Why there is value in training business unit employees in the likes of lean six sigma helps employees understand the continuous improvement process
• How to engage the business units and encourage their ongoing participation in the business transformation journey
  

Peter Evans, LEGO Continuous Improvement Director joins us and lays out the Lego Philosophy: "I think we have a mission, which is to create the builders of tomorrow. We mean that absolutely. So it's something that's ingrained in us, which is that; A toy is one of the most important educational objects that you can possibly have, and by using play, and by using the creativity, or by accessing the creativity of our kids and all of those people, then we build not only people who love Lego, but we build better people."

PEX Network spoke with Gino d’Hont from innogy SE to see how RPA and Process Mining are impacting business processes at innogy SE and how they have utilised these tools to overcome the challenges of wider transformation.

What is the better way of structuring your organisation? Do you ensure that all processes, policies and communications come from one place in a centralised model – and risk missing a trick in a local market? Or do you let each region operate autonomously – and risk huge differences in quality, service and expectations between locations?

Global Head of Process Excellence at Uber, Martin Rowlson joins us from PEX Europe where he shares that the region comprises 20% of the volume for the organization but 70% of the complexity. Based on the pace of change within the industry and the rate of growth at his organization, Martin's goal is to identify best practice, align best practice and build on best practices. Defining processes can’t take two weeks because "that process may have gone…literally gone."

Nigel Leppitt, Global Head of Organisation and Business Transformation at Allianz joins us and shares that it's tough to ensure process excellence during traditional cycles. But Nigel has been tasked with doing so in a completely new business model and returning the business to profit. With cost considerations being hyper-sensitive, Nigel and the team needed to decide whether to buy platforms or build their own. They decided to build which meant two years of design and development which Nigel preferred to building his organization around the platform

Recorded at PEX Europe, Transavia COO, Petra De Ruiter talks about how the company has been in business for 50 years due to their focus on Customer Experience and Operational Excellence. While Petra and her team have utilized traditional Process Excellence methodologies, they were interested in structural improvements which would bring the enterprise into the world of tomorrow. While looking at the people, the culture and the structure, Petra set a north star for her vision, but left it somewhat opaque to ensure that it was Agile.

Laura (Evans) Rosenberger, COO at Naked Wines UK on the organization's take on process excellence. In less than 3 years Laura has gone from Head of Continuous Improvement to COO and in this podcast Laura discusses her roles. From financial planning and analysis, being involved in budgeting, forecasting, measuring the performance and helping setting the strategy.

Simon Williams, Senior Software Developer at Transport for London on modernizing TfL's Customer Service Operations in Stations, and how Technology applies to their Train Service, Maintenance and Employment Practices. Simon is also looking at centralizing some of TfL's facilities.