Bob lillis cranfield

Management Services Spring 2015

Sustaining change in manufacturing companies By Bob Lillis and Marek Szwejczewski

W hy do changes stick in some organisations, while in others they peter out and decay? After all, for most companies, it is a strategic imperative to sustain change and its associated performance improvement. Sustainability means that the new working practices and the improved performance persist for an appropriate period of time. The change has become the norm. It is 'how we do things around here' and is not a one-off or a temporary improvement but is on-going. Unfortunately, the failure rate of change initiatives is high - 70-90% are believed to fail.

While studies have focused on the factors that minimise initiative failure and help ensure the successful implementation of the change, far less is understood about how to sustain the initiative once the initial implementation period is over. For example, research into change initiatives specifically in manufacturing organisations, have tended to cohere around

either how to implement total quality management (TQM) successfully or the success factors affecting the process of lean production implementation. However, the most comprehensive study into how to sustain any organisation's change initiative once it has been successfully implemented, was that carried out by Buchanan et al (2005). Their thorough review of what is known and written about sustaining organisational change identified a set of 11 common factors. The outline definitions of these factors are shown in Table 1.

For example, the influence of Leadership is commonly accepted as important in successfully sustaining change. This factor would include facets such as, has the senior leadership team established a clear and consistent vision? Is the Leadership also leading the change once the implementation phase is over? Considering the factors in Table 1 and outline definitions at face value, what is missing is any understanding of the

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FACTOR DEFINITION

Leadership Setting the vision, goals and leading the change Individual Employees' individual commitment Managerial Managerial style, approach, and behaviours Financial Balance of costs and benefits Substantial Perceived centrality, scale, fit with organisation Organisational Policies, procedures, system, and structures Cultural Shared belief, norms, and values Political Stakeholder and coalition power and influence

Processual Implementation methods used Contextual External conditions and threats Temporal J Timing and pace of change activities

Table 1: Buchanan et al (2005) factors with definitions.

Respondents' Job Title

Number o f Years in Role

Number of Employees A ffected by the Change Programme

Duration o f the Change Programme (in years and all on-going)

Manufacturing Sector___ _________

Operations site director human resources director

3.5

5 800 3.5 Food processing

Deputy vice president 5

100 1.5 Engineering

European operations director 3 18,000 1.5 Metals

Production manager 15 80 1.5 Petrochemical Regional operations manager 4 100 2.5

Chemicals (detergents)

Production manager Managing director

2 10 50 3

Chemicals (Coatings)

General Manager 3.5 300 3.5 Semiconductors Head of integration compliance 4.5 200 3.5 Telecommunications

Service director 6 400 3.5 Machinery Global environment manager 4 55,000 4.5

Chemicals (paint/ coatings)

Operations director 4 170 4.5 Cement Plant controller 4.5 200 4.5 Car accessories Managing director 6 50 6.5 | Plastics

Table 2: Respondents' identification and interview sample.

relevance of all 11 factors in different contexts and the respective influence that each individual factor may have on encouraging sustainability. For instance, does employees' individual commitment to sustaining the change outweigh the managerial style, approach and its behaviours? Is Leadership more important than the Financial factor to sustaining change? In other words, do some factors have more impact than others on successfully sustaining change? In this article, we report preliminary findings from stage one of a two stage research project which sought to answer these questions.