Our client designs, manufactures and distributes professional coffee machines.

A continuous improvement process was started to redefine the specifications and costs of the assemblies, subsets and components designed, purchased and produced. Initially, the project failed to achieve its goals – reducing complexity and lowering procurement and manufacturing costs – to the extent expected.

• Identify process criticalities and install an organizational device capable of impressing a strong acceleration;
• Estimate the savings potentials by dividing them by type of intervention;
• Enter the saving objectives in the company budget.

Syngroup participated as an observer in a continuous improvement meeting to identify and highlight weaknesses that made the initiative excessively viscous. Among these were highlighted:

• a company target not very challenging both in economic terms and in terms of obtaining time and work rate;
• excessive rigidity of the internal continuous improvement process;
• limited management by priority;
• organization in formal sharing of meetings;
• limited effectiveness of upward and downward reporting;
• absence of an “ad hoc” decisional device.

The assessment phase concentrated efforts on defining the targets by exploiting the knowledge and skills of the main suppliers in the first place. They have been able to propose simpler and cheaper technical and supply solutions. Secondly, the efforts were concentrated on the company functions that most “suffer” from the design choices and the “impositions” of sales.

The evidences that emerged allowed the construction of synoptic tables characterized by the intervention, the saving potential, the level of difficulty in achieving them and the expected times of internalization of the benefit.

The tables, reworked into a presentation document, and enriched by the proposals for organizational changes, were exposed to the Management Committee which approved the change of gear of the continuous improvement initiative.