Driving Operational Excellence Through Effective Change Management
Project Overview
Directly aligning to the organisational priorities of operational excellence, cost transformation and incidence free, our global oil and gas client wanted to deliver a harmonised maintenance process and global SAP template across its four operating locations. In order to proactively maintain their assets and deliver safe and reliable operations the Maintenance Work Management (MWM) process was defined with a focus on ensuring that:
the right work was being done at the right time, in the right place, with the right people,
having the right tools, instructions and materials, with the right quality and at the right cost.
Afiniti was engaged to provide change management services as part of the global SAP MWM programme team supporting operating units in Denmark, Kazakhstan, Qatar and the United Kingdom. We were involved in the design and implementation phases and delivered an extensive change management programme to over 3000 people. We embedded a process and system designed to ensure control over work by safely and effectively identifying, prioritizing, planning, scheduling and closing-out maintenance work as well as ensuring close collaboration across organisational functions.
Our Solution
- We supported facilitation of the global design workshops with a focus on equipping stakeholders with relevant outputs to return to their locations to build consensus and allow finalisation of decisions around the detailed business / SAP process
- We developed and executed a comprehensive change strategy that was tailored across locations to address different levels of maintenance maturity, organisational structures and alignment to and resistance against the desired way of working
- We conducted a detailed impact assessment for each location to highlight changes across functional areas and ensure development of the right communication and learning strategies for each role
- We created a strong visual identity for the programme and developed an engaging and creative campaign to bring the story to life, build employee buy-in and prepare the business for go-live
- We managed the production of process documentation and learning materials to support implementation and ensure a sustainable global approach for the future
- We worked with sponsors and other key stakeholders to define engagement and business readiness activities as well as future success measures including development of user reinforcement activities
The Differences We Made
- We contributed to the successful delivery of the MWM process that resulted in improvements to productivity, management of risk and cross-functional collaboration in line with operational excellence objectives
- Our engagement increased organisational awareness of effective work management on SAP – this led to the concepts being embraced by other disciplines
- Our proactive business preparation and readiness activities resulted in SAP MWM go-live experiencing the lowest number of technical incidents and support requests for a major project the client had ever seen
- We helped form the global MWM community that embraced and drove continuous improvement as part of business as usual activities
- As an outcome of this engagement our scope was extended to cover change management across all SAP initiatives, allowing us to build further momentum, focus on adoption and to start increasing internal change capability and awareness
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