This transcript is a taken from the Creating a Lean Culture, The Mancunian Way Keynote by James O’Sullivan (Site Director) and John Blacklock (Senior Manager, Continuous Improvement) from Hologic, at the UK Lean Summit 2024 on the 24th April. Hologic are as a leading innovator in women’s health, helping healthcare professionals around the world diagnose and treat their patients with precision, certainty and confidence. James and John share their journey from switching to produce covid diagnostic testing during the corona virus pandemic through to developing “The Mancunian Way” at Hologic’s Wythenshaw site. If you would like to watch this keynote, please watch the YouTube video below.
Introduction to Creating a Lean Culture, the Mancunian Way
John Blacklock: I’m going to talk to you about operational excellence and our journey in Manchester, UK, which we call “The Mancunian Way”. It’s quite a daring topic to discuss the glories of Manchester when you’re in Liverpool on the 13th floor, but here we are. We call it the Mancunian Way because we manufacture in Manchester, and it belongs to Manchester – it belongs to all of us. Rather than using a term that might not be meaningful, our operational excellence system and quest is called the Mancunian Way.
John’s Introduction
John Blacklock: A bit about myself: I’ve always worked in manufacturing, and I love it. I’ve worked in the plastics industry, for a toothpaste company, for Fox’s Biscuits—which was one of my favourite jobs – and for a company that made devices for counter drugs. I now work for Hologic. Outside of work, I support and help with greyhound rescue, which is a big pastime of mine. So, if you want to know more about operational excellence or adopting a greyhound, I’m your guy!
James’ Introduction
James O’Sullivan: James O’Sullivan here. I’m the site director at Hologic. I started my career at GKN, predominantly in the aerospace business. In fact, David (Marriott) and Peter (Watkins) were probably the first people to teach me anything about lean. Here we are, 15 years later, and they’re still teaching me, which is good. I’ve done everything from wing structures to exhaust systems to lip skins. I was also running the site down in Luton, where we built fast jet canopies, windows, and ice protection systems. But last year, I made the leap into Hologic. I’ve gone from aerospace to medical devices, drawn by the operational quest we’re on, and the Mancunian Way.
About Hologic and Their Mission
John Blacklock: We’re going to talk about the Mancunian Way, our quest to become operational excellent, and the journey we’ve been on. We (Hologic) are a women’s health company with the purpose of enabling healthy lives every day. We predominantly work in the women’s health industry and believe we do more for women’s health than any other company. Hologic is an American company listed on the NASDAQ with revenues of about $4 billion, but it doesn’t have a universal operating system, which is interesting. In Manchester, we produce test kits, and we’re in the diagnostic division.
Our Operations in Manchester
John Blacklock: Let me tell you more about our operations in Manchester. Our site started manufacturing in 2013. We have 160 employees in operations, 300 in total with some shared services, and we’ll be supporting 28 million patients this year. We produce diagnostic test kits for human viruses. We’ll take a swab, and we’ll also diagnose that swab for a human virus. The kits are used on a machine called Panther, which typically sits in hospitals. We focus on areas like HPV testing, which is a leader for cervical cancer screening, as well as STDs, HPVs and SARs COVID – which we will get on to. Our products from the Manchester site are distributed globally, excluding the US, where their plants handle distribution.
Like any process-driven operation, we bulk produce products, fill them, and then package the. Typically, like most pharmaceutical or diagnostic products, bulk products are quite expensive, and if we get it wrong, it’s a big problem. A batch of bulk products might cost around £100,000. We use both automated and semi-automated technology.
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic
John Blacklock: The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on us in Manchester. We were part of the response to the global pandemic. Within weeks, we were building new plants, understanding what the virus was, and producing PCR test kits. You may remember these if you were a victim of taking one. We were receiving calls from government ministers asking, “Where are my COVID test kits?” It was a great time because we were incredibly busy. We launched new production lines and warehouses, moving from a 5-day to a 7-day, 24/7 operation. Everything changed. And we produced 50 million PCR test kits. It was an exciting time. It was all about delivery—constantly focusing on delivery.
Post-Pandemic Challenges
John Blacklock: However, we then had our “COVID hangover”. We had our ‘Long COVID’ after coming out of that period. Thus, we had a number of issues because we hadn’t been taking care of the operational excellence and people. We had high inventory in the wrong places, customer service issues, and teams working in silos – which was interesting. We had created a situation where everyone was working in silos, and firefighting became our default mode of operation. Although we had lean tools, they weren’t maintained – a little bit of 5S, bits of TPM, but nothing was maintained. Our employees didn’t want to work for us anymore, which was a significant message. Our Gallup survey reflected this, showing that we were in the bottom 25% of companies worldwide in terms of engagement. We had to do something; we couldn’t continue like this.
The Birth of the Mancunian Way
John Blacklock: This is when the Mancunian Way was born. We took pride in being in Manchester and many of our colleagues are from the Manchester area. So, we decided we wanted to connect the pride of Manchester into the pride of our factory and plant. We thought about culture and people being the heart of what we wanted to do. The image below shows a montage of pictures leading into our canteen, featuring some of Manchester’s greats. We wanted to connect the science of our work with a commitment to doing what’s right.
Learning from the Shingo Model
John Blacklock: We came across Shigeo Shingo, who helped the West understand Toyota Production Systems. He outlined guiding principles on what great looks like, covering areas like culture and continuous improvement. Some concepts, like “embracing scientific thinking,” were challenging for our teams to grasp. What would this mean to an operator? So, we adapted his model to use terms that would resonate with our teams. For example, “scientific thinking” became “solving problems using data” – the Mancunian Way. We won’t cover every detail, but we’ve translated Shingo’s principles into Mancunian words.
Focusing on Culture and Core Values
John Blacklock: We started by focusing on culture, which is important. We didn’t have an operating system to copy we knew culture was our biggest gap and biggest gain. So, we created a vision to serve 100 million patients, defined our core values, and emphasised recognition based on values. We recognise how teams and individuals performed tasks, not just completing projects. Our values include trust, citizenship, and respect, with input from our operating teams on what these mean to them.
The Mancunian Way Workshops
John Blacklock: We introduced to team members on what Shingo is about with Mancunian Way workshops – the Mancunian light, as well as Gemba walks. However instead of using the term “Gemba walks,” we call them “Mancunian Wonders” because it’s more meaningful and we recognised against our values.
Creating a Lean Culture, the Mancunian Way
John Blacklock: At the highest level, this is the Mancunian Way; We’re creating a culture at our Manchester site where we can give our best of ourselves, finding better ways of doing things, aligned with our site vision. One of the first things we did was encourage teams to write poetry, which they created themselves. It’s something we’re proud of.
To watch the video of this, please watch it from 10:05, or click here.
James O’Sullivan: The video and poem was built by the team, written by the team, performance. They did it all and it shows what it means to them. The final quote (of the video) is one that sticks with our team, which is ‘This is Manchester, we do things differently here’.
Moving Forward with Our Own Strategy
James O’Sullivan: John mentioned that we didn’t have a top-down or corporate strategy for operational excellence, which meant we could create our own. This was both terrifying and exciting because we had a blank canvas. Everything that John’s described sits in Cultural Enablers of our Mancunian Way Triangle. We weren’t pressured into jumping straight into tools and systems; instead, we focused on culture for 12 to 18 months first. This is an error where you see many lean transformations fail because they jump into tools too quickly.
Lean Fundamentals and Kaizen Events
James O’Sullivan: Now, with a solid foundation in place, we wanted to start playing with continuous improvement. We didn’t have a set roadmap, but we knew certain things were part of our staple lean diet. A few of things we did 12/15 months in included daily Kaizen and Kaizen events – how do get our teams to be able to make improvements? We broke these down into 2 categories.
Daily Kaizen – how do we get our teams to make small improvements every day. How do we empower them and give them the time and tools and encouragement.
Kaizen event – big events, multi-functional, multi-day, where you put a lot of resource into it and make a big difference.
We moved away from the old suggestion scheme, CIS, which often led to frustration. However, there was no ownership, so team members expected someone else to do the suggestion. So, we got a team of people (not leaders) to develop a new system called AIM – All Improvements Matter. This system gives teams the ability to raise an idea and see it through to completion. It’s visual, so it’s on the teams daily tiered management boards so they can watch the ideas progress. It also gives them the opportunity to escalate, ensuring they have the resources and support needed. We also have an aim of the month award, and we have local awards, to be able to recognise and reward some of the better ideas that are really making a difference.
Kaizen Events Continued
So, the Kaizen events. How did we plan Kaizen events? How do we get make it so that they’re going to be successful? We created a Kaizen pipeline. It’s a paper, written by hand, manual, hands-on system – ease versus impact and analysis to decide what which events we’re going to take forward.
We then have a 6-month planning cycle. 6 months’ worth of Kaizen events broken down into 4 weeks slots. It then would go into a preparation cycle and there’s 4 weeks of preparation to a standard checklist. For example, this is to make sure we’ve got rooms booked, we’ve got our material, data has been gathered, the teams been allocated etc.
Then we would have the big day the Kaizen event. and then we have a 30 / 60 / 90 day check to make sure the metrics that we were trying to influence, we have influenced and any outstanding actions have been completed.
Training and Lean Fundamentals Workshops
James O’Sullivan: So, we’ve given people the ability to make some changes, but they don’t even know how to talk in the lean language and any of the lean tools. Therefore, we developed a Lean Fundamentals Workshop, a two-day immersive course where teams learn and practice using a 240-volt plug factory example. The workshop covers key topics such as the 8 wastes and DOWNTINE, value-added vs. non-value-added work, creating pull and flow, problem-solving and how we get good problem definition – what happens when we pass defects.
After every round the team fill in a daily management board and the report out to the facilitators, they then talk about what they’re going to do differently for the next round. And then, Standard Work and Yamazumi to make sure that all our work cells are balanced. Through six rounds, teams experience a transformation from a chaotic first round to a well-functioning factory by the sixth round, showcasing the journey of continuous improvement.
Establishing Tiered Daily Management
James O’Sullivan: The next step we knew we had to focus on was tiered daily management. This is the backbone of how we communicate and how we measure our performance. We designed our system with four tiers. Tiers 1, 2, and 3 rely on the power of the pen – no printouts; everything is filled in daily at the start of each shift. All the metrics are aligned with business expectations and flow down to the tier 1 level, allowing an operator to see their contribution to site-level objectives or goals.
Our big drive is how do we get 80% of problems to be solved at a tier 1 level to avoid unnecessary escalations. How do we give the teams the empowerment and the tools to be able to solve these problems? And ran to the same standard. At Hologic, we have a blend of Key Behavioural Indicators (KBIs) alongside Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track not only performance but also team behaviour. How are our teams behaving? What ideas are they coming up with are they making the place safer? Are they recognising their teammates? We believe if you focus on the behaviours the KPIs will follow.
Creating an Inclusive Environment
James O’Sullivan: So, the big headline is ‘it’s not about reporting the news it’s about making the news ‘. The message we’re sending to our teams is if you’ve had a red day that’s okay show us what action you’re taking. Therefore, we’re really driving the action taking and about making the news for today not just letting it continue. See below an example of what a tier daily management board looks like in our Factory (tier 3).
In line with our cultural emphasis, our tiered management boards put people first – which is something we took from our team as part of our Mancunian way. This might differ from other daily management boards, but for us, it highlights the importance of psychological safety and team well-being. While safety remains a priority, our boards reflect the understanding that people are first. The top row of the board provides a quick overview of whether we are winning or losing based on a red or green status – 10 feet 10 seconds, followed by ‘what’s our trend’. Is it an immediate trend that’s just gone red or have we got a problem within month. We also have a contribution chart helps pinpoint contributing factors towards a problem (if we have one). Under each pillar includes problem-solving boards for teams to act and resolve issues.
Our tier 4 board is a weekly review, not a daily review. This is effectively our management review, but we follow the same People, Safety, Quality, Delivery and Cost. We include the KPIs in it, as well as the KPIs. In summary, this is us taking action on a more weekly trend that we were seeing.
The Hacienda: Our Obeya Room
James O’Sullivan: So where, do we centre what I’ve just mentioned all out of? To centre our Mancunian Way journey, we created an Obeya room but wanted to personalise it for our team. We held a competition to name the room, and the winning name was “The Hacienda”. The Hacienda was a famous nightclub in Manchester that defined the city’s music scene in the 1980s, and its name also translates to “a place where things get done” in Latin, which felt fitting for our mission.
Developing a Structured Approach to Problem Solving
James O’Sullivan: The Hacienda is where we centre our mission out of. Then we realised we liked the idea of solving problems, but we didn’t know how to do it in a structured way. This is where LEA came in and really helped us. So, we had a structured approach to problem solving and we knew we wanted to go from basic problem solving or reactive (just do it) through to Rapid and then into some of the more advanced tools.
We pulled LEA in to help us with this and what I love about this process is 2 things. 1 – it’s a 4 step process so it’s simple to get your to get the team’s heads around. 2 – we are creating a capability to look after ourselves. We’re not only teaching people to use the skill, but we’re teaching teachers to teach and coach as well. Therefore we’re going to become self-sustained once we’ve completed it.
The process starts with online learning (Skill Level 1) and progresses to on-site, face-to-face training (Level 2), which takes about half a day. After this, each team member takes a real-life problem from the factory and brings it through a 12-week cycle, all the way to completion and a report-out. We’ve seen fantastic report outs and now have 16 team members advancing with the journey, with 18 more in training, and 6 who can coach others—our in-house experts, effectively for free.
Reducing Lead Time and Streamlining Operations
James O’Sullivan: The other part of our staple diet was reducing end-to-end lead time. We are an industry that has not revisited batch sizes or inventory for some time. Dave Brunt (LEA CEO) was a fantastic help here in terms of breaking our products down into families. What we learned was by following the Glenday Sieve process, 90% of our products comes out of the top 3 value streams. So, by focusing on 3 value streams we can be influencing 90% of our products. The process we’ve developed is map out the current state, map where your inventory is etc.
We mapped out our current state to identify where our inventory was and conducted a “Blue Sky Thinking” exercise to envision our ideal state/vision three years down the line. The reason we do this is if you ask people to do it in 1 year or 6 months, they get a bit panicky that they’re going to be held to it. So this is the ‘Pie in the Sky Thinking’. Then we do 6-month iterative future state maps to get to that 3 year vision. For example 115 days is the current state to get a product for raw material through to shipping to the customer. We think we can get that down to 38 with some of the improvements that we’re going to make.
Implementing Sprints for Continuous Improvement
James O’Sullivan: With our staple diet complete, our teams started asking, “We like what we are doing, but what’s next?” They wanted a clear roadmap and a plan. We reflected on this and developed a framework we call “Sprints”. How does this work? Well, we have our guiding principles. which is everything that we need to do, everything that we want to work on and why we want to come to work every day. Then we’ve got our values which is how we want to behave and how we want our teams to behave. Finally, we have our Sprints. the Sprints is basically a five-phase model aligned with our cultural enablers. Each one of these cultural enablers of the individual symbols is linked to the Sprint. What we are going to do through those 5 Sprints is continuing to work on each element of it.
We also developed a Lean Maturity Assessment to measure our progress, not just in terms of systems and tools but also in behaviours. Are we seeing the behaviours we want to see aligned with our guiding principles? See below for more detail. Our Shingo Coach helped us as were throwing lots of stuff into these Sprints. The coach basically brought it back and said these you there you guiding principles, why are you not aligning them to these.
Reflecting on Our Journey and Results
James O’Sullivan: As John mentioned, we were at a low point in 2021 with our Gallop engagement score. Since then, we’ve seen significant improvement, moving above a 4, which we consider strong for a manufacturing site. Although there was a slight dip recently, we’re not discouraged. We’ve also seen an increase in hazards and continuous improvement ideas year on year and improving the rate we are building these ideas. Furthermore, 735 of our team members are actively recognising each other against our core values.
Closing Remarks: Creating a Motivated Workforce
James O’Sullivan: The biggest lesson we’ve learned so far is about culture—the habits of people and how they generally behave. How do we get our teams to start behaving in the ways we want? I want to conclude with a story about a man who wakes up on a Sunday morning. He looks out the window and sees it’s a cold day with snow and ice on the ground. He should go to Church on Sunday morning but decides not to go to church because the road is icy. However, in the afternoon, he gets a call from his friends who are down at the pub, enjoying a warm fire and some beers. It sounds exciting, so he decides it’s okay, he’s going to walk to the pub CAREFULLY.
It comes from an old proverb, ‘the church is near, but the road is icy. The pub is far but, I’ll walk carefully.’ Now, I’m not going to dare step into a Minefield of trying to compare work with either religion or a pub. But if we think about the decision that this man made, why did he not go to church that morning? He didn’t want to and could make an excuse. Why did he go to the pub? In the afternoon? Because he wanted to and he could make an excuse to get there.
Summary
So, the message is how do we get our teams to want to come to work to want to make changes? We want to create an environment where teams are kicking the door down because they’ve got a new idea, they want to come and implement it, they are empowered to do so and they recognise when they do it. This the Holy Grail as far as we’re concerned and we’re going to continue to chase that Holy Grail, but we’re going to do it the Mancunian way.