BMW globally runs a lean manufacturing program called VPS (Value Production System) in all its plants around the world and is the cornerstone of its manufacturing process and success. It is a deeply impeded culture within everyone in the plants. It’s a religion, a science, the “way you do things around here”.
One of the most important characteristics of the program is to have a continuous improvement mindset to always improve something no matter how small within your own areas of work and responsibility. These thinking generated hundreds of continuous improvements projects each year in China which shaved off valuable seconds from the production processes, saved millions of dollars for the company and drastically improved the working life of associates, in most cases without spending any money.
However, plant directors in China after seeing the success of the program in the production areas, wished to transplant VPS from the production to the non-production areas which crudely means from the plant to the office areas in which the Finance and HR Divisions operated.
One of the earliest tasks given to me when I first joined the BMW company in China as a change manager was to manage implementation of the VPS program into the HR Division (change management is a department which I belong to sits under HR).
I took the job over from an outgoing German colleague who said that it was not uneasy task to sell something from the plant side to office staff. Before long I realised that he was absolutely right. I was still raw with inexperience in my new job as a change manager. But I am glad that I got my fundamentals right: I started with the leadership of HR first.
Seeking commitment from the HR leadership and inspiring the HR Managers
The first step was to find alignment with the HR leadership at the highest level, the 7 HR department’s heads. I developed a project plan which I pre-discussed with my line manager and attended the HR leadership’s circles several times to seek their commitment and support to engage their next level managers in a kick-off workshop. The following slides were used in this kick-off workshop.
The photos below were captured during the workshops with the 30 HR senior managers. In the workshops, I managed to create an awareness and a commitment at a starting level for the plans that I proposed.
Setting up a community of change agents for continuous improvements in HR
I managed to built a community of 32 change agents (called “Integrators” in the BMW world) which represented the HR Division quite well. I organised a kick-off workshop for them and started enabling them together with awareness, tools and tasked them to generate and support continuous improvement projects with their own sub-departments. See slides used in the kick-off workshop above and actual photos below.
HR Division submits 37 continuous improvement projects in the first year
In time, I created a weekly VPS meeting with all the 7 key change agents and developed our plans together further. I lobbied in ore HR management meetings, attended various HR sub-departments’ meetings, organised one-to-one and small group discussions and change interventions as necessary. This took many months as colleagues were in transition and needed support and motivation. Definitely there were some setbacks in some occasions but generally the progress was forward looking. At the end of my first year on the project, the HR submitted a total of 37 continuous projects to the Plant Directors which was the highest number of projects ever submitted by the HR Division.
I was requested to continue the role again in 2015 and 2016. In both years, I continued developing the HR managers and community’s skills sets to develop and lead continuous improvement sprjects. I brought in experts and trainers to tool them further. The above slides are from one such workshop for a joint coordinators and managers’ workshop which I organised.
In time the HR Division decided to scale back on the quality of its annual continuous improvements projects to about ten per year but paid more attention to the quality and bottom-line impact of the these projects. In 2016, I accepted a one year posting to be based in Beijing to support other change projects and handed over my role to my successor.
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