The Organisation:
Flexiform Business Furniture Limited is a specialist company that designs, manufactures, supplies and installs office furniture to a wide range of organisations and businesses, throughout the UK. Based in Bradford West Yorkshire - with satellite operations in London and Edinburgh - they translate customers' needs quickly and effectively into installed solutions. Their strength comes from their ability to organise their skills and resources to meet the needs of a very demanding market.
The Challenge:
The business has grown significantly over the last few years, as demand for its products and services has soared. The operation expanded to meet this growth, but the combination of additional volume and volatility in the marketplace placed a huge strain on many areas of the operation. Nick Hewitt - the MD - identified that although the Company could cope with the additional output, it was achieving this in an unsustainable way. Faced with the dilemmas of managing an extremely complex operation in a fast-moving sector, the challenge was to determine what the real issues were, and in which order they should be addressed. Nick had the skills in his senior leadership team to analyse the operation, but he knew using an external organisation would provide Flexiform with a fresh perspective on the effectiveness of his organisation. This is when he turned to The Excellence Partnership for help.
The Approach:
The Excellence Partnership applied one of its Business Diagnostics, within Flexiform to help the Company understand its issues.
This diagnostic took the business through the following 7 steps:
- A review of its key business processes.
- Interviews with staff involved in these processes.
- Detailed analysis of Flexiform's financial and operational data.
- The identification of the causes of the issues in the operation.
- Recommendations on the solutions needed to resolve the causes of the issues.
- Estimates of the improvement potential from implementing the recommendations.
- A plan to implement the recommendations.
The Outcome:
The recommendations have now been implemented, and the improvements made are allowing the business to operate more effectively, and in a sustainable way. The results are seen at Board level through Flexiform's operational and financial reporting systems.
Nick Hewitt is extremely happy with the outcome, which has allowed him to quickly address the issues he knew needed to be tackled. The board was also delighted with the results as it has allowed them to accelerate their improvement plan for the business.
Nick said "The review The Excellence Partnership carried out has been a great help to our business. They've looked at the whole organisation and given us facts and data to clarify the improvement potential, and prioritise our next steps."