OB: Case Study
In the world of motoring, the BMW brand has long been synonymous with high-quality
products, advanced engineering and high performance. Away from the cars themselves, the
company has been striving to ap
...
OB: Case Study
In the world of motoring, the BMW brand has long been synonymous with high-quality
products, advanced engineering and high performance. Away from the cars themselves, the
company has been striving to apply those qualities to its manufacturing plant at Cowley in
Oxford.
When BMW took over the Rover group in 1994, it acquired in the MINI the most British of
products, but it also inherited a British car-manufacturing culture born out of decades of
industrial relations strife and low productivity. Six years later BMW broke up the Rover group
and sold it off in pieces – with the Rover brand being taken over by the independently run MG
Rover Group and production of the Land Rover moving to Ford. The German manufacturer
retained the MINI brand and set about overhauling a product that had sold more than five and a
half million cars in more than 40 years of production. It also recognised the urgent need to
change working practices at the plant.
Monika Lampe, change manager at BMW Group Plant Oxford, says that a revamp of working
practices was essential for the new model to succeed. ‘When we started at Cowley, the legacy
of Rover and the work culture was very much “us and them”. There was a blame culture within
the plant and, to be honest, people used to leave their brains at the gate,’ she says. ‘We were
in a competitive market, and to compete as a business we had to create a culture of success.
We had to change processes, attitudes and behaviour and to empower staff and involve them
in the processes.’
So, in 2000, the firm invested more than £230 million in refitting the Oxford plant and
launching a major change programme called ‘The New Oxford Way’ (NOW). This focused on
three key challenges: upgrading the site and processes to world-class standards; integrating
the different BMW and Rover cultures, expectations and experiences; and launching a new
vehicle. The programme was made up of nine ‘sub-projects’ aimed at embedding a variety of
attributes into the culture: working in groups; management performance; Oxford identity;
information/communication; integration of support functions; competence assessment training;
standardised processes; target management process; and reward management.
The central element in the implementation of these projects is known as ‘WINGS’ – a
contraction of ‘Working in Groups’ – which involved the creation of hundreds of ‘self-steered’
teams of between 8 and 15 people across the plant’s manufacturing areas. WINGS teams have
been given the power to tackle production problems themselves, when previously they would
have had to call on other departments. The group members also now rotate tasks within their
area to break up the monotony of production-line work. In addition, rather than being
management-led, the focus is now on initiative and self-management, and employees have
received external training and coaching in working as part of a team.
Heike Schneeweis, HR Director at BMW, says the setting-up of WINGS created a turnaround in
both working practices and employee behaviours. ‘The development of self-steered teams
diminished the power of the traditional hierarchical structure and gave much more
responsibility to the working teams in the manufacturing area,’ she says. ‘It placed continuous
improvement and the achievement of plant improvement targets directly into the hands of the
team members.’ The day-to-day duties of one person from each WINGS team have been halved
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