Many continuous improvement initiatives stall when a deeply historical workforce is simply unfamiliar with what modern, optimized operations look like. At New Balance’s Flimby site, a 300-strong team took pride in their craftsmanship but accepted legacy inefficiencies as the norm. Leadership focused the first six months on realigning strategy and building trust.
By addressing frontline frustrations, improving the staff conditions, expanding parking, and boosting transparent communication, they established a high-impact environment focused on talent retention. Building a real-life cultural web assessment was the key to unlocking what happened next. This session details how they successfully introduced practical Lean principles to transform hearts and minds.
What You Will Get From This Presentation:
- The Talent Retention Framework: How aligning continuous improvement with visible workplace upgrades creates an environment where people want to stay and grow.
- Defining “What Good Looks Like”: Practical tactics to introduce new operational benchmarks to a heritage workforce without invalidating their past craftsmanship.
- The Trust-Building Strategy: Why solving basic daily associate frustrations is a prerequisite for launching successful cultural change.
- Hard Quality Improvement Metrics: The step-by-step methodology used to systematically drive product defect rates significantly down.
- Eliminating Production Bottlenecks: Technical insights on identifying physical flow constraints while introducing new talent into legacy assembly lines.
- Hearts and minds: A repeatable roadmap for balancing senior executive commitment with practical, empathetic hearts-and-minds training. Engaging the entire work-force to deliver the highest quality footwear.
- Transformation journey to best in class: Demonstrating a four-year transformation journey focused on achieving operational excellence and best-in-class performance, underpinned by the deployment of Hoshin Kanri policy deployment across all functions to drive alignment, engagement, and cultural impact.
