Lopaz has experience with several Blue Chip Defence clients and managed several Continuous Improvement programmes. This includes:

Customer Facing Business Unit (CFBU) which has been MoD funded. This has involved working with the team to set up Process Excellence governance and introduce Lean thinking. We have also prepared the department for internal improvement audits, setting up various processes and tools to help them progress to the company ”Process Excellence” targets.

We have used such tools as “Value Stream Mapping” to interrogate business processes to support major MoD contracts. Typical benefits included reaching “Gold” status for Process Basics by aligning the team to various improvements driven by a Master Schedule for the department. We challenged business processes systems to identify improvement activities as well as engaging all team members.

Head Manufacturing Engineering Improvement. Lopaz has also undertaken to establish “Best practice” processes within a Manufacturing Engineering (ME) department, to identify processes which the ME carries out but does not add any true ME “Value Add” to the activity. By doing this we have identified several opportunities where some aspects of their tasks can either be deleted or carried out by more administrative roles thus leaving the ME to focus their expert “technical knowledge” to better effect. This is another form of taking “waste” out of the process.

Quality - Non Conformance process has also been a focus of detailed “Value Stream Mapping” and analysis. Engaging a multi-functional team to identify the Current State “As-Is” process and comparing this with the actual process as defined by the business, demonstrated lack of alignment. It also identified how slow and sluggish the process was to respond. This in turn caused production delays as the Non Conformance process became bogged down. Using suitable tools and resource we have now put in an improved process which has seen big gains in overall lead time reductions and quality of information being processed as well as establishing for the first time agreed Service Level Agreements across functions.