Babcock - Case Study - Agility System

EMPLOYEES

YEARS AS A CLIENT

EXCESS DOCS ARCHIVED

Babcock is a leading provider of critical, complex engineering services which support national defence, saves lives and protects communities.

Babcock focus on three highly regulated markets – defence, emergency services and civil nuclear – delivering vital services and managing complex assets in the UK and internationally. The organisation understood the need to simplify the management system in order to guide the workforce in delivering efficiently and safely, while maintaining compliance with the multiple standards and regulations that governed activities.

The Challenge

Based in Rosyth, Fife, Scotland, Rosyth Royal Dockyard primarily undertakes reﬁtting of the Royal Navy surface ﬂeet. Owned by Babcock International Group PLC, Rosyth Royal Dockyard has a reputation built on quality. However, they were aware that there was the potential for a major product quality failure due to the combination of the volume and complexity of their paper based integrated management system and a reduced workforce.

The amount of paper based procedures had become increasingly difﬁcult to maintain and important details regarding product and service requirements were lost in a sea of text. A major internal effort had been employed to generate processes and reduce the number of procedures. This had been done using paper based systems via off the shelf ﬂowcharting software. Whilst achieving signiﬁcant advancements, they realised that paper based systems were not agile enough to respond to their market needs.

The Solution

BusinessPort were engaged to supply a number of services to meet this challenge. Our ﬂagship Agility System was installed to provide a number of capabilities:

Provide a process mapping capability to remove the complexity of paper-based procedures, make them easily accessible and quicker to understand
Rationalise the overall document base by approximately 50% through cross-departmental process maps
Deliver an inherent safety risk assessment capability linked to individual processes within the system
Provide alignment between ISO 9001 requirements in support of their certification programme
Provide the basis of future improvement programmes by bringing clarity through visual representation

23 years on from this implementation in 1998, Babcock continues to be an advocate of the Agility System and the integrated approach that links process, risk and compliance in one system.

Discovery Exercise

In order to identify the specific business processes with the company, BusinessPort performed a Discovery Exercise which is our proven methodology to provide an overall scope of deliverables in addition to revealing the following:

Providing a benchmark to identify duplication of documents
Eliminating redundancy due to changes in working practice
Uncovering gaps where document development is required
Creating ‘Ownership Links’ between disciplines and documents

The deliverables at the end of this exercise were:

A Master Document Register (MDR) containing a list of Processes and Documents
Initial high-level Business Models & Process Overviews
An approach and Project Plan for System Build Phase & Roll-Out

This exercise was successfully performed across all departments at Babcock Rosyth Naval Base and set the foundation for one of the first and most successful transformations from a document-centric management system to one that was process-based.

The Benefits

Babcock recognised that transforming from the traditional document-centric system to the process-based approach provided the flexibility and scalability that the organisation needed when change was occurring at such a phenomenal rate, resulting in the following:

Improved communication throughout the base
Improved internal conﬁdence in compliance issues
Improved external confidence (Regulatory Bodies) in compliance issues (i.e. Lloyds Register)
Faster change mechanism
Vehicle for Strategy Change
Clearer accountability and visibility of exact Business Processes
Alignment to Company Strategy
25% greater efficiency in Change Management Projects due to visibility of Business Process

The project was a great success and was replicated in the other naval bases in the UK.

“Babcock in Rosyth has worked closely with BusinessPort for over a decade now. In that time the company has helped Babcock grow into what is now a FTSE 100 organisation. Recent benchmarking facilitated by our IT function of the global management system provision market has conﬁrmed that Agility is a class leading solution which, as a result, is now being spread across our UK Marine and Technology companies in order to realize effective integration of our companies.”

HEAD OF QUALITY AT BABCOCK