Reducing budget spend by £10s of millions through innovation
Challenge and approach
A large railway infrastructure company had significant financial challenges and needed to develop a system to convert the numerous ideas across the business in to real money (i.e. reduced budgets).
Starting with a blank piece of paper, we identified the value in the ideas across the business, built a lightweight process to manage the ideas, developed an internal team, and used internal management tools (based on Toyota Visual Management approaches) to push ideas across the line.
Impact
Despite having to deal with a highly regulated environment and long standing traditions, the team has gone on to surpass all expectations and is on course for £100m+ of savings within the allocated time period. Benefits are tracked assiduously – savings are signed off from budget bottom lines by all stakeholders prior to completion.
They are now regarded as the ‘go to’ people to enable focussed technical and working practice change within the organisation.
They have been nominated for a number of prizes for business efficiency and they continue to identify valuable ideas and drive them through to completion.