2018Case14 BreedonCement

54 L EAN C ONSTRUCTION I RELAND A NNUAL B OOK OF C ASES 2018 Case 14 – Breedon Cement Breedon Cement is the cement division of the Breedon Group which partially purchased the Lagan Group, including Lagan Cement, in April 2018. Breedon Group operate as three autonomous divi s ions : Breedon Nor thern and Breedon Southern are fully-integrated aggregates and downstream products businesses, and Breedon Cement is the UK’s only independent cement producer. The Lagan purchase was the Breedon Group’s first venture outside the UK, and thanks to all our hard work the acquisition will ensure that the company will grow its position in the market. The Breedon Group, like Lagan, has always been an ambitious and forward-thinking company. With the addition of Lagan, the Breedon Group wi l l now have two cement plants, around 70 active quarries, 40 asphalt plants, and 200 ready-mix concrete plants in the UK and Ireland. Breedon Group also has seven concrete products plants, a clay products plant, a brick plant, and two slate production facilities in Wales, in addition to six import-export terminals: three for cement, two for bitumen, and one for aggregates. C O M P A N Y W E B S I T E OVERVIEW OF THE LEAN INITIATIVE This case examines the Lean journey of Lagan Cement (“Lagan”) which i s commi tted to “being the best in everything i t does” and enabl ing excellence in its people by endeavoring to bring out the best version of each person every day through its winning culture and core principles to ultimately add value to all its customers. Lagan’s own Lean journey is founded on its core principle of a “Mindset of Being Even Better”– with “Even” being a recognition of past excellence and “Better” being a present and future orientated mindset of constructive dissatisfaction to ensure that complacency never enters its DNA. The Lean pillars of Respect for People and Continuous Improvement are a perfect match for the other two core principles of “Culture of Respectful Challenge” and “Can Do/Make it Happen Attitude” which assert that the greatest potential for improvement and innovation lies in frontline employees engaged in daily problem solving and idea implementation. LEAN INITIATIVE UNDERTAKEN – LEAN THINKING, TOOLS, TECHNIQUES www.breedongroup.com AUTHORS Jody Guilfoyle Declan Carr Andy Brophy Lagan started its Be Even Better journey in early 2016, and had the following as its objectives: • From an already high baseline attain even higher levels of employee engagement. The Q12 engagement levels were quite high in 2015 and 2016 against sectoral benchmarks, however in striving to be even Be Even Better, the aim was to incrementally increase the overall level of employee engagement. • Increase overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by 5% on bottleneck equipment – improve kiln uptime by 5%. • Release latent capacity across all equipment to meet the needs of a growing market – increase output by 5%. • Improve communications across the business in real-time and know how it is doing at a glance. • Improve energy consumption across the site by 5%. The journey started with a diagnostic assessment of the current state of the bus iness against 30 “Keys to Operational Excellence”, including, for example, Root Cause Analysis, Visual Management, Quick Changeovers, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). Tiered Morning Stand-ups – A 3-tier rhythm of morning meetings is now in place across the site. In Tier 1 the frontline team leaders meet at 8:15am to review the previous 24 hours’ performance in terms of safety, quality, cost, delivery, and people. Each trade brings a WIN (What’s Important Now) card that must be resolved within the shift BACKGROUND TO THE LEAN INITIATIVE As a formerly privately-owned family-run business, Lagan views its people as its greatest asset and endeavours to be authentic in everything it does. With that in mind, its focus was on simplicity, consistency, and authenticity. The business why sets out the vision, mission, and guiding principles for the company, and, with authenticity at the core of what it aims to achieve, i t al tered the language to be more appropriate to its own business. Vision was replaced with “Destination”, Mission was replaced with “Journey”, and Guiding Principles was replaced with “Vehicles”: • Our Destination: “To be recognised as being the best at what we do”. • Our Journey: “To bring out the best version of ourselves, everyday”. • Our Vehicles: “Our winning culture by living our Core Principles”. Lagan’s core principles are: • Can-do make-it-happen attitude. • Be even better mindset. • Culture of respectfully challenge. To help achieve the core principle of Be Even Better, Lagan set out on its Lean and Continuous Improvement journey with the ultimate destination “to be recognised as being the best at what we do”. This initiative was undertaken via Enterprise Ireland’s Lean Transform business support programme and involved Andy Brophy as an Enterprise Ireland approved Lean Service Provider. COMPANY OVERVIEW