When DSM integrated the former Roche Vitamins business, one of the major drivers was cost reduction. It would later be integrated as DSM Nutritional Products (DNP). The different Roche Vitamins sites had to develop their own integration plans, with clear targets for reducing costs.
I became involved as team lead Process Automation, together with two engineers from Roche Vitamins.
We visited the major sites and organised workshops with the local teams. Each site had an integration team, including a DSM representative and a McKinsey consultant, which was working on the overall site integration plan.
Our part was to look at the process-automation and operator organisation, but the local teams were looking at the future organisation much more broadly.
Starting with the work
The workshops were essentially an activity analysis around the existing operator work places, in control rooms and elsewhere.
We went through what operators actually did, what activities were performed at each work place and what the workload was.
From this we could work towards the future organisation.
Two elements were particularly important.
The first was centralisation of the control rooms. If several existing operator stations could be brought together, the work could potentially be performed with fewer operators.
The second was the establishment of an operator day-shift team, moving activities that did not need to be performed by shift operators into a different organisational arrangement.
But the local teams did not look only at Operations.
They used the work processes as a basis for designing the organisation that would remain around the central control room. In particular, processes such as Improve Plant and Do Maintenance helped define what responsibilities would remain outside the shift organisation and how those activities should be organised.
At the same time, Operate Plant Normal provided a basis for defining the future operations organisation and the way the central control room would operate.
This was an important aspect of the work-process concept: it was not simply a description of what people did. It could also be used to design an organisation.
From activities to a business case
Based on the activity analysis and the proposed future organisation, we could estimate the required future headcount.
That estimate became an input to the site’s overall integration plan and therefore to the cost-reduction target.
There was another practical aspect.
If we proposed centralising control rooms, there would be consequences beyond the operator headcount. Where would the new control room be? What would have to be rebuilt? How much construction work would be required?
I therefore brought in an ergonomist to assess potential locations for the future control room and the associated construction work.
So the exercise connected several levels:
existing activities → work processes → future organisation → central control room → operator headcount → construction requirements → cost reduction.
This was quite different from simply saying: “We can save operators by putting the control rooms together.”
The work-process framework helped determine what the future organisation would actually do and how the responsibilities would be divided.
From one project to a larger transformation
This was also a significant step beyond my earlier Rotterdam experience.
In Rotterdam, I had been the project manager for a particular control-room consolidation and could develop the solution from the ground up.
Now the same basic ideas were being applied across several sites, within a much larger organisational transformation. But the experience also taught me that not every plant was suitable for exactly the same strategy. Some of the DSM Nutritional Products processes were much more complex, with considerably more manual work, and in those cases the case for centralising control rooms was simply not there. The approach therefore had to start from the actual characteristics of each plant rather than assuming that one solution would fit all.
There was an interesting combination of approaches.
The cost-reduction target provided the business driver.
The activity analysis provided the factual basis.
The work processes provided a framework for designing the future organisation.
And the central control room became one of the major changes through which that organisation could be realised — where the characteristics of the plant made such a solution appropriate.
From designing the organisation to teaching the way of working
The initial round of site analyses was only the beginning.
Once the future organisations had been defined, we started the work-process training. I was involved in training for Operate Plant and Asset Utilization.
This brought the work-process concept to a different level.
During the workshops, we had used the work processes as a framework for thinking about the future organisation. Now people had to learn what those processes meant for their actual work: their roles, responsibilities, interactions and the way performance would be managed.
And this was where I could bring something from the Rotterdam experience back into the story.
I invited one of the Rotterdam operators who had been particularly enthusiastic about the new control-room environment to participate in the training.
He could tell the new colleagues what had actually happened after the new system had been introduced.
He had not simply sat behind a different set of screens.
He and his colleagues had started asking for information they needed, building displays themselves and using the historian and other tools to create solutions for their own work. The new technology had given them possibilities that they had discovered and exploited themselves.
That was a much more convincing demonstration of empowerment than anything I could have explained in a classroom.
For the Improve Plant training, I also invited the plant staff manager from Rotterdam.
That was deliberate.
The idea was not to create a standardised training course delivered by people from the integration project. We wanted people who had actually lived with the new way of working to share their experience with colleagues who were about to go through the same transformation.
Looking back, I think this was an important characteristic of the DSM approach.
The change was propagated through people who had experienced it, not only through procedures and presentations.
The work processes provided the common language and framework. The control-room projects provided a practical application. And people from the earlier projects could explain what the new way of working actually looked like in practice.
The control-room concept was subsequently implemented at the different DSM Nutritional Products sites by the sites themselves — with one notable exception: Scotland.
In Scotland, instead of supporting the implementation from a distance, I would become the implementation project manager myself.
And there the question would become much less about designing the organisation on paper and much more about actually changing the way people worked within it.