“With joined forces to manufacturing excellence!"

This was the motto for an initiative aimed to develop an easily understood and comprehensive strategy for production practices at Conti - without reinventing the wheel. The idea was to enable cooperation and a dialog among plants to share experiences by way of a common language, as well as put an end to redundant development efforts. To this end, the practices of eight truck-tire plants worldwide were merged in one system - the Continental Tire Manufacturing System (CT.MS).

CT.MS combines elements of plant management with standards for organizational and management processes, as well as methods and tools that provide optimum support for these processes. Personnel from the various locations got together to pinpoint the right standards and compare notes on best practices.

Conti aimed to roll out the system to its truck-tire plants as soon as it had finished developing it. This is where Agamus Consult entered the picture. Our consultancy was tasked to present this CT.MS to some 5,000 employees at eight plants in Asia, South Africa, Europe, Brazil, and the USA. The goal was to bring all employees and managers up to the same level, ensuring everyone understands the system and is committed to improving it further at every plant.

Agamus Consult used its Communication Boards (ACCBs) to train all participants to the same standard and summon the necessary motivation. One of the great advantages of working with ACCBs is that they allow us to convey content and convince people using the same fast, simple, and thus economic approach.

So what challenges did we face in developing such a board to put Conti’s manufacturing system across to the people destined to use it?
The CT.MS is complex and multifaceted, so the big challenge in developing the Communication Board was to come up with a compelling storyline that conveys all key aspects without delving too deeply into the details.
What’s more, a Board designed for a global corporation with eight locations on five continents - Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa - must factor different languages and cultures, especially, into the communication equation.
This Board would also have to take plants’ status into account because CT.MS had not been rolled out to the same extent everywhere. Some plants had successfully implemented CT.MS, while people at other plants had never even heard of it, much less applied its practices.
 
Agamus Consult and Conti’s intercultural project team succeeded despite these great challenges. In an intensive joint development effort, we managed to create a full-fledged Board within a scant four months. Replete with manuals and accompanying materials, it was ready for rollout.

Entitled Race around the world – the introduction of CT.MS, the Board was first used at the plant in South Africa, where the workforce was unfamiliar with CT.MS. The board helped convey the philosophy behind CT.MS to all employees. Their feedback was excellent, and the objective of bringing all employees up to the same level of understanding had been achieved. The workforce’s response to the Board was very affirmative, and the initial measures it had elaborated with the Board have already been implemented.

The upshot of all this is that the strategy of involving the various plants right from the start and implementing the manufacturing system in a joint effort paid off. The groundwork has been laid for the workforce to adopt and embrace the CT.MS, and the Agamus Consult Communication Board played a decisive role in achieving this level of acceptance. Conti’s managers are utterly convinced that the board was the right choice for communicating CT.MS, and that it is a tool that works very well indeed.

Gina von Steinbüchel, Agamus Consult