The organisation maintains and operates both the electricity distribution and fibre networks in the North Island, New Zealand. Its contracting business provides construction and maintenance services to some of NZ’s largest electricity networks and prides itself as continually redefining service delivery to driver performance to help communities thrive.

The Challenge

Driving consistent service delivery to customers across different contracting branches comes with challenges. There are always opportunities for the different teams to learn from each other and apply better practices and innovations. An area of growing concern has been how ‘design estimation’ are made with customers. Design estimation is the upfront process that provides a quote to customers and determines the work to be delivered by project managers and engineers. It is a complex process that not only varies by geographical region, but also by the different types of jobs.

They needed external help that could act independently and bring together its teams to facilitate sessions from a position of neutrality. Rowan Teh was engaged to drive consistency and efficiency in the design estimation process. A key challenge for Rowan was bringing together stakeholders from various geographies to standardise the design estimation process and make it Lean.

Key Outcomes

Rowan produced a clear roadmap for making improvements to the design estimation process based on data-driven decisions. Following Rowan’s process improvement approach enabled them to:

1. Unite stakeholders across all regional offices on a common definition for major, minor and customer tender project work as well as their current-state processes
2. Identify measurable value-add, non-value add and waiting times and associated cost to the business
3. Capture, prioritise and track progress of completing improvements
4. Develop staff in Lean to instil a culture of continuous improvement.

Our Difference

Rowan was the chosen partner for the organisation, offering unique services for process excellence that:

1. Combined world class Lean techniques, deep Energy and Utilities industry knowledge to ensure targeted outcomes for organisations
2. Applied a process improvement methodology, which accelerates the traditional Lean approach. During the transformation journey, Lean events were ‘rapidly’ completed, value stream analysis ‘reported’, and improvements generated to ‘reimagine’ the process. This was all achieved in virtual workshop sessions to cater for the geographically spread stakeholders and restrictions due to Covid
3. Supported working in a virtual work environment embracing the use of digital tools. We used digital tools to capture inputs from workshop participants by walking through the end-to-end current-state of the design estimation process.

Conclusion

Rowan simply offered a uniquely different and data-driven way of understanding business requirements and generating an ideal-state. Rowan provided an electricity benchmarked process structure template to align the their processes with an industry standard taxonomy. This provided them with a guiding structure for capturing current-state processes as well as potentially value-adding processes universally accepted as industry standards. By following this structure, they could be easily translated into system requirements that many solutions align to.

If you’re looking for a trusted advisor for process excellence, with a difference, contact us.