Supporting a company’s transformation planning to improve operational performance

Situation

Our client, a major manganese producer in South Africa, faced declining profitability following a sharp fall in product prices. Management was tasked with reducing unit production costs by improving operational performance and cutting headcount by 30%. A major organisational transformation was also planned, involving changes to shift schedules and staffing, a revised mining model and placing one mine on care and maintenance. Our team was engaged to support planning for the transformation period, prepare contingency plans for trade union strikes and/or civil unrest, and establish a transformation control room to oversee project delivery.

What we did

• Supported the development of 16 workstreams for the transformation project, defining key activities, deadlines and accountable owners.
• Set targets for key project milestones and developed KPIs for the HR department.
• Created a tracker to monitor employee movements in detail at critical stages of the transformation.
• Introduced short-interval control to track employee transfers and redundancies against targets.
• Established a transformation control room to monitor project objectives and key cost reduction KPIs.
• Developed procedures for control room meetings and trained all client personnel involved.

Results

• Detailed activities, deadlines and accountable owners for each key milestone in the transformation project.
• Introduced daily and weekly transformation control room meetings to track progress and delivery against KPIs, set priorities for the next period and keep all stakeholders informed.
• Improved visibility of emerging deviations during the project, identified critical-path activities and introduced idea-generation sessions to address those deviations.

The transformation control room

Practical constraints ruled out a digital control room.