ProfitAbility Business Simulations Clients - Case Studies - Timken
‹ Back to Case StudiesHow Timken employees learned to build their business around their customers
When the “big cheeses” in a huge manufacturing company like Timken get behind a major change initiative, you can be sure something very special is about to happen...
Recognising that Timken benefited from some of the best sales training in the world, the business’ leaders posed the question: “How much more success could we achieve with some of the best manufacturing training in the world?” In 2002, the Timken Manufacturing Academy was launched with a vision to change the way manufacturing professionals think and behave.
ProfitAbility provides both a board-based manufacturing-specific simulation as well as a role-play simulation as the backbone of the Timken Manufacturing Academy. The results have been extraordinary.
As a world-leading provider of bearings, alloy steels and related products and services, Timken faces two key challenges:
1. A rapidly changing market place—expanding supply chains, dynamic competitive landscape and evolving customer needs
2. A need for plant managers all over the company to operate at higher levels of complexity than their ‘one job / one site’ experience permits.
With the help of ProfitAbility, the Timken Manufacturing Academy addresses these challenges head on by hand-picking groups of high potential plant managers (or soon-to-be plant managers) and putting them through their paces at a two week Academy programme. Participants come from all over the world, creating strong global alumni who can network and continue to discuss business issues after the event.
Dr. Kim Ridgway, one of the originators of the Academy, describes the objective as
“...giving prospective Timken leaders an opportunity to run a manufacturing plant—and the skills and mindset to make it succeed.”
Among the mixture of development experiences the Academy participants are exposed to is Total Customer Satisfaction® (TCS). This is a role-play simulation-based workshop, designed and led by ProfitAbility, which works on the premise that if Timken people understand how to build a customer focused business, they will give better service and bring home more profit.
The delegates are divided into teams, each team inheriting a manufacturing organisation in disarray. The organisation’s purpose is to manufacture and sell greetings cards. The team’s purpose is to turn around the organisation so that it satisfies its customers’ needs and secures more and more orders at the right price.
The process involves a number of 20-minute ‘rounds’ where the teams’ organisation must understand, collect and fulfil the customers’ greetings card requirements. They can change anything about their inherited company (people’s job roles, how orders are taken, prices etc.) but have to get approval from their CEO (a ProfitAbility trainer) for financial commitments.
The customer buys and re-buys just as he or she would in real life—according to whether the products are delivered on time, at the right price, with the correct specification and whether they were treated well as a customer.
ProfitAbility workshop leader, Dr John Fletcher, says: “In the first 2-minute round, teams struggle to make the 11 cards required. During the second and third round, teams get their head around reducing the number of admin staff, coordinating sales and manufacturing and making sound logistical decisions. They start to produce 50, 60, 70 cards in the 20-minute rounds. By the time we get to the last round, some teams are selling and manufacturing 150 cards in three different varieties in 20 minutes! It’s quite remarkable.”
Timken’s Academy participants regularly ask the ‘CEO’ for budget to make a change to their team’s organisation e.g. moving a manufacturing plant closer to the customer. More often than not, these changes are approved but not implemented. When challenged, the delegates reply that they are too busy making cards to implement the change—even though it will improve their ability to satisfy customer needs in future rounds. Dr Fletcher says: “When we run TCS in Timken, we find this trend is much more apparent than when we run it in open programmes such as Ivy League MBA programs. The reason is because Timken participants bring their business culture with them, making change more difficult. They are behaving as they do in the work place—but the simulation enables them to see the behaviour, understand its impact and make the change.”
One of the strengths of TCS is its parallels with real working life. Dr. Kim Ridgway says: “ProfitAbility understands our business very well, consistently making the connections between simulation and real life. And after returning home, each attendee has six months to create a PowerPoint presentation addressing, “What I Changed in My Plant” as a result of the academy.”
Anecdotal evidence of the programme’s success abounds. In the early days it was difficult to persuade managers to release their high potentials for two weeks to attend—now the Academy is heavily over-subscribed. When Kim Ridgway wrote an article about the Academy for the Timken intranet recently, it achieved 3,000 hits—the most an internal article has ever received! Managers of participants are very clear that the programme delivers huge benefits. They describe how their people return talking about issues and discussing strategies they have never mentioned before. Plant managers describe their delight at hearing, “We shouldn’t do that because it won’t benefit the customer if we… / we’ll save more money if we… / our margin will increase if we…”
All change indeed.
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