Embedding quality
Babcock: Creating a quality culture
We supported the international defence contractor, Babcock’s Land division, to embed a quality focused culture in their vehicle maintenance operations.
The challenge
Responsible for servicing and maintaining military vehicles, the Babcock Land team has a direct impact on the ability of the Armed Forces to operate safely. It was essential to ensure its work gave the Armed Forces equipment it could depend on.
Following a number of quality challenges, we worked with Babcock’s internal quality team to identify underlying issues and engage everyone in the service and maintenance value chain.
Our solution
We developed a comprehensive engagement approach under the banner Target Quality, which focused on four critical areas for improvement and enabled colleagues to explore the quality issues and agree what they needed to do to address them.
An important aspect was for colleagues to understand how their decisions and actions impacted on the ability of others to fulfil their roles further along the value chain.
The engagement approach included team conversation kits, behavioural nudge campaign tools and a review of quality standards to ensure they were as easy to understand, accessible and visually engaging as possible. These standards were then provided in an easy-to-use digital format for all front-line employees to access through tablets on the shop floor.
The outcome
The target quality programme was rolled out across all Land operations, increasing understanding of how to thread quality through the whole value chain. This resulted in a measurable improvement in the quality issues originally identified.