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Focused journey of change.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The challenge: Align a newly merged manufacturing organization to a common way of doing business while meeting ongoing contractual obligations. Overcoming this challenge would require a journey based in the lean philosophy, Six Sigma, and a manufacturing excellence mode that defined positive behavior change. Suppose you worked at a company that had just completed complex mergers of four different companies into one. Let's say you were in charge of 3,000 employees in your manufacturing organization that interacted with 8,000 others in various program and functional organizations, and your task was to align the work of 23 factories into one smoothly operating lean process. To make things a little tougher, what if your employees were consolidated from different geographic locations from around the country (as a result of the mergers), with each employee bringing different processes, methods, tools, systems, and work cultures? And what if you discovered there were language differences--even though everyone spoke English? What if the strengths of each former company represented tremendous potential if they could be captured, hut in reality these strengths were slipping away? And don't forget that you still had to meet contractual production obligations to your customers while you were solving these problems.

The Raytheon Missile Systems manufacturing organization in Tucson, Ariz., faced exactly these challenges. Three years later, the organization was recognized with the Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Excellence in 2004 Curious how we did it?

The following story will give you the essentials of our change journey and what we did to make things better. Ours is not the only way to change and achieve improvements, but it is the story of what we did to align a large number of employees and organizations at Raytheon to achieve success in Tucson.

The journey

In a nutshell, the goal was to align an entire organization. The challenge was to do it while we were already in business. In a way, it was like rebuilding an airplane while it was flying.

The first step was to "Go get smart," as the operations manager said. A core team was formed consisting of five Raytheon Six Sigma experts from different parts of the organization. (Raytheon Six Sigma is the umbrella initiative launched by Raytheon to help transform tire entire corporation.)

The core team embarked on a learning expedition by benchmarking other companies to discover how they had overcome similar challenges. The core team also reviewed the rich histories of the companies now merged into Raytheon. The result was a mixed bag of critical concerns, activities, tools, models, and plans. The core team learned what worked and didn't work at other companies and what might work for us. The discovery was that Raytheon Missile Systems (RMS) operations needed to create a solution tailored to our own unique work culture and business challenges while leveraging the learning and wisdom of others. In short, we needed to use what we learned to build the change model that would work for us.

A lean vision

Visions with catchy slogans and buzzwords are fine for marketing, but they serve little purpose in guiding the average employee in daily efforts. We were not suffering from a lack of vision; in fact, we had the opposite problem. The merger...

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