The first two years - John D'Arcy Senior Consultant.
As an undergraduate looking at this page you are probably wondering about the reality of working for Newton and, like me at your stage, the reality of working at all.
I started working for Newton in the autumn of 2004 bright eyed and eager having had 3 months off after graduating from Cambridge. I made the most of this time - 3 weeks in Athens watching the Olympics, 2 weeks in Slovenia and Croatia doing all kinds of outdoor activities and 2 weeks in New York visiting a friend from Uni.
The first two weeks with Newton were a classroom based induction, the first week in a country hotel in the Malvern Hills, the second in Barcelona. Lead by one of the directors, the weeks were hard (harder I'm ashamed to say than the work I'd done at university) but the transfer of knowledge was very quick - quick enough that each day flew by. By the end of the 10 days I had built up a great relationship with the people I started with, got to know the directors, and I was ready (in principle) to go onto my first site and start to solve problems and improve my first process.
The following Monday I drove up to a small town north of Manchester to meet the senior consultant on site. I got a quick briefing on the underlay factory, the people at each level in the organisation and their responsibilities. I was very excited to find that I was getting my own production line to work on rather than only a small section. My first task was to complete an assessment of the line to find out where the opportunity lay and how much it was worth. This process took a week, and by the end we had clear picture of where to work. My machine was relatively efficient and produced little waste. The opportunity was in a limited number of short duration downtime problems and from increasing speed. At the end of that first week on site I presented these findings to the production director of the factory. I was very grateful for my induction training which had taught me to restrain my natural tendency to jump in and interrupt people. Working together we developed a plan to work on speeding up the areas of the machine which affect the greatest proportion of products made on the line first.
The first machine I worked on was the winding machine which took a continuous sheet of underlay and wound it into a roll - this was the line bottleneck on the lighter products. By analysing the cycle time of the machine I worked with an electrician on site to make upwards of 10 changes within the machine's program to alter its cycle. In three weeks we sped up the winding machine by 30% and also made changes which reduced its downtime. With these changes made we could increase the line rate. The previous maximum line speed achieved was 16.9 m/min, we achieved 20!
Within a period of 4 months working on the line the team increased the output by over 20%. The most satisfying part of the work was introducing and running a morning meeting on the line. Everyday the management team would review data from the previous day and ensure that actions were taken away to solve the biggest problems on the line. At first people thought the meetings were a waste of time but as problems were solved and the line performance improved momentum grew and the on site team began to drive the improvements themselves.
Towards the end of the project I helped the Senior Consultant on site deliver problem solving workshops to Shift Managers, ran weekly meetings with the Production Director and continued to regularly update the team on the improvements. The day before I left site, the Senior Management took us out for dinner to celebrate the success of the project. It was great to hear from them how sceptical they were initially and to know that my work had helped change their opinion so greatly.
The next week, 6 months into my career, I was the sole consultant on site at a paper mill. I had on site support 1 to 2 days a week from one of the Directors (who was also always available on the end of a phone) but now all the responsibility for improvement was on me. It was a small mill producing niche paper products such as watermarked paper and coloured card. The factory staff were very entrenched in their view of the process and believed that speeding up the machine caused an increase in paper breaks. The biggest challenge in the project was motivating people to carry out trials - the management were not prepared to take any risks whatsoever, meaning a trial which may cause a 15 minute loss in production was very difficult to carry out. Paper machines are complex, so I also had to quickly get up to speed with the chemistry and mechanics of paper making.
The project reduced the paper breaks on the machine by 25% giving operators the confidence to turn the speed up by 10%. I had delivered my first project and I had found I was able to operate independently and work with Senior Management on site without an immediate safety net.
My next project was a further step up in responsibility - a large site and a junior consultant to support. We were working on 2 lines in an ice cream factory in Lancashire. I led the improvement programme, ensuring the project plan remained on track and that the other consultant was delivering results. I was responsible for running all meetings with the senior management to ensure project milestones were met and that the project would meet its payback targets.
Working in the ice cream factory was incredible. There were so many problems it felt like we were solving a new one every single day. Only a few were particularly valuable, but by the time we had made over 100 changes to timing, guarding, conveyor speeds, sensor position, working method and accumulation methods we had increased output by 50% and halved waste on both of the lines. We added over £1m pa onto the profits of the company - which had a turnover of about £30 million - in 6 months. The challenge on the site was not the attitude of the people to change (which was excellent) but the speed at which work had to be carried out. A personal highlight was having an article about the work done published within a trade journal. It's amazing how much credibility you gain when your name is in print!
I realise this is a lot of detail about what I've done during work, so a bit of detail about what we get up to out of work and the culture of the company. Firstly, and most important to me, is our policy on weekends. We don't work them. The policy is to leave site to be in the pub at 6pm on Friday night (which has often meant me leaving site at 3pm on Friday afternoon) and then not work at all over the weekend. The work on site is very intense so it is important to have time off to recover. Having this time free at the weekends gives me time to keep playing all the sport I want - I still play in cricket and football teams at weekend (as well as competing in the very competitive Newton racquets ladder!). The culture of the company is youthful (I think the average age is about 26), energetic and enthusiastic. We meet for 1 day every 2 weeks to review projects and to top up on training. Meeting up beforehand on Thursday night for a meal and a few drinks to share 'war stories' means we get to spend some quality time together away from work. Once every quarter we have an activity day with as well as Christmas and Summer parties (which I'm helping to organise this year) which are open to partners.
I hope the above has given more detail about how the first years of your career at Newton could be. If you have any questions, please contact me at john.darcy@newtonconsulting.co.uk |
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