Executive summary
Awareness: / Understanding PROBE’s Analytical Models
Baseline: / Overview: Where are we up to, how do we compare?
Our performance: what do we measure, what does it tell us?
Ouropportunities: improving our practices for enhanced performance and rewards
Ourcapability: actual and potential momentum for sustainable excellence
Compelling vision: / What can we achieve and contribute?
Down to action: / Our next steps for Sustainable Excellence
Evaluation: / Planning for success, maintaining focus and momentum
Appendix 1: Membership of the PROBE Team
Appendix 2: The PROBE Team’s agreed scores

Executive Summary

An Executive Summary should be written by the PROBE Facilitator to emphasise key points relevant to the business that has completed the PROBE assessment.

PROBE can help the business to:

  • strengthen its Awareness and understanding of the challenges and opportunities involved in the pursuit of sustainable excellence
  • establish a Baseline of today’s position
  • develop a Compelling vision of its role in a sustainable future
  • get Down to action on priority areas of opportunity and need
  • and subsequently Evaluate progress to stimulate a cycle of continuous improvement.

Awareness: Understanding PROBE’s Analytical Models

1. PROBE’s Analytical Framework:Achieving and sustaining world-class status is based on the proposition that adoption of best practice leads to strong operational performance, and in turn to superior business performance. ‘Practice’ refers to the processes that an organisation has in place to design, manufacture, deliver and measure its products and services. ‘Performance’ refers to what is achieved, with emphasis on operational aspects including product/service quality, cost, delivery, innovation and sustainability.

Through the questionnaire, the PROBE team assesses many aspects of their organisation’s[1] practices and performance. Their consensus scores are analysed and compared with a framework of world class sustainable excellence. These scores are also compared with those of others who have used PROBE.

PROBE has developed an analytical framework which illustrates the cause-and-effect relationship between:

o / the processes at the heart of how the business functions
o / performance across a range of perspectives, and the sustainability of that performance
o / how the business’s activities contribute to sustainability in the broader societal/environmental sense

This framework can be applied to businesses/organisations of all types across all sectors, enabling PROBE to provide the broadest possible benchmarking and learning opportunities.

PROBE views ‘Performance’ through the lens of The Balanced Scorecard, a well–established framework for developing a holistic understanding of a business’s performance, from four key perspectives: Financial, Customer & Stakeholder, Internal Process Perspective, and Learning & Growth. This analysis of performance addresses the issue of what the business achieves.

Importantly, PROBE looks beyond the question of what is achieved, by also asking how the business operates. It does this by examining the processes through which the business functions. This provides insights into why the performance is as it is, and how it can be improved.

PROBE uses an adapted version of a widely-used and respected generic process framework[2], examining a set of Operating Processes and Management and Support Processes which exist in some form in any organisation, and to provide a description of all of the key aspects of how the organisation functions.

The third ‘lens’ through which PROBE examines the business is the framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD). This powerful framework, developed by The Natural Step, provides a rigorous, science-based definition of sustainability. This lens enables PROBE to help businesses assess the extent to which various aspects of their practice and performance are contributing to society’s sustainability.

2. PROBE’s Manufacturing Insights Framework: the framework described above is used by all PROBE tools, enabling PROBE to provide the broadest possible benchmarking and learning opportunities across all organisation types and sectors. PROBE for Manufacturing Excellence take the analysis a stage further by also applying the Manufacturing Insights Framework to provide a specifically manufacturing-focused perspective on the business’s strengths, comparisons and improvement opportunities.

PROBE’s Manufacturing Insights Framework originates from the findings of an influential series of best practice studies during the 1990s led by teams from London Business School and IBM’s Industrial Consultancy Practice. These studies assessed the management and operational practices of individual manufacturing and product development operations and resulting indicators of performance. The first PROBE best practice benchmarking tools evolved directly from these studies.

The Manufacturing Insights Framework has been refined and updated to keep it at the leading edge of best practice, in the light of developments in world’s best practice and of the experience of deploying PROBE with thousands of businesses internationally.

Baseline Overview: where are we up to,

how do wecompare?

This diagram shows indices of Overall Practice and Performance. The resultant position says much about the organisation:

  • Leaders–practice and performance exceed 70; these leading organisations are achieving World Class status
  • En Route – practice and performance exceed 50; not there yet, but Contenders for world class status
  • Promising– practice over 50, performance below 50; they have untapped potentialfor stronger performance
  • Vulnerable – practice below 50, performance over 50; they look strong at first glance, but they won’t go the distance
  • Aspiring–practice and performance approaching 50; progress is underway, need to focus and build momentum
  • Unsustainable– low scores indicate risk andopportunity; urgent, focused action required

This result positions the organisation in the {name of zone of graph e.g. ‘En Route’} zone of the world class model, with a practice index of {practice score}% and a performance index of {performance score}%.Further comments may be added here regarding how the organisation’s score compares with the average for the Comparison Group and/or the Overall Sample. And/or comments about what this result might mean in the context of this organisation.

On the scatter diagram, the red square shows the position of this PROBE survey and the green triangle the position of the overall sample average – the average of all the green crosses. The yellow squares identify other organisations that are in a particular comparison group (such as a sector: the comparison group is identified in the bottom row of the chart’s title), and the blue triangle is the average for the comparison group.In this case, the comparison group is ‘{name of Comparison Group e.g. Furniture and fixtures}’.

(If applicable)Since this is a repeat benchmark, the black square/squares identifies/identify the results of the previous PROBE benchmark(s).

The shaded area on the chart indicates the zone beyond the ‘best practice’ standards described in thisAdvanced version of PROBE for Manufacturing Excellence. This is described as the ‘Next Practice’ zone, representing the standards that we can expect will be achieved in the short to medium-term future, when the next breakthroughs in the evolution of best practice are devised and implemented. This is a helpful reminder that Excellence is and always will be a moving target.

Bear in mind that the organisations in PROBE’sdatabase are a self-selecting sample. Their average may well be higher than the true average of the business community as a whole. By definition, organisations that use PROBE have a somewhat positive attitude towards techniques such as benchmarking that can help drive continuous improvement. They represent a tough standard of comparison.

Baseline performance: what do we measure, what does it tell us?

This chart shows several indices, calculated to produce a gap analysis. Superimposed over the quartiles bars, the red square indicates the position of this survey andthe blue square indicates the comparison group average and the green square the overall sample average.

The PROBE Team’s scores for all questions contributing to these 4 perspectives are shown in Appendix 2.

Financial Perspective:

In a world class business:

  • Financial results meet or exceed the high expectations of key stakeholders
  • The flow of cash into the business consistently exceeds the cash outflow
  • The business has made and continues to make consistent and substantial progress in terms of market penetration/share
  • Inventory turns fast –achieving the difficult balance of minimising inventory levels without compromising flexibility responsiveness to market demand.

Customer and Stakeholder Perspective:

  • Once the business has made a delivery promise, it keeps it
  • Customers’ expectations are often exceeded, resulting in very high satisfaction
  • The business sets, and meets, tough standards for itself. It takes responsibility for indirect effects of its activities (e.g. sustainability impact throughout whole life cycles of its own products and services 'in use' and of products, materials and services it buys)
  • Customers never feel let down.

Internal Process Perspective:

  • Processes are more than capable of delivering the standards demanded, providing very high confidence in the quality of outputs
  • Work proceeds smoothly through the various stages of processing
  • The business relentlessly achieves substantial productivity gains, becoming and remaining a leader in its field for productivity
  • The business is flexible and responsive to unpredictable customer demands
  • Material processing cycle timesare little more than the fastest possible times in which the same individual items could theoretically progress through processing, with no time at all spent on non-value-adding activities such as waiting, being transported, or being re-worked.
  • Defects have been virtually eliminated from material conversion – quality achievements are at or beyond ‘six sigma’ levels?

Learning and Growth Perspective:

  • The business has very strong ethical foundations and a clear sense of purpose, values and direction which is universally shared
  • People like working in the business and are loyal and positive. Employee satisfaction is very strong with positive long-term trends
  • The business is a leading innovator, with a large proportion of products and services that are new and fresh. Innovation in processes embraces high levels of continuous improvement and radically new approaches
  • New Product Development lead time (‘time to market’) is a source of advantage for the business.

Some comments may be added here regarding key points relating to the business’s performance.

The Manufacturing Insights Framework provides an additional, specifically manufacturing-focused perspective on the business’s baseline performance.

If appropriate, further comments may be added here regarding key points relating to the business’s performance.

Baseline Opportunities: improving our practices for enhanced performance and rewards

Excellent practices deliver excellent performance. Performance can only be improved by strengthening the practices and processes through which the business operates.This chart examines the status of the business’s Operating Processes, the value chain at the heart of the business’s activities.

The PROBE Team’s scores for all questions relating to Operating Processes are shown in Appendix 2.

Develop Vision and Strategy:

In a world class business:

  • Leaders at all levels deploy outstanding leadership skills and behaviours
  • A sophisticated understanding of customers and their expectations is the central focus of planning and development
  • A compelling vision of sustainable excellence is firmly embedded and shared throughout the business
  • Manufacturing strategy is robust, progressive and well-integrated with overall business strategy, with strong evidence of highly innovative thinking and behaviour at strategic level.

Develop and Manage Markets, Products and Services:

  • A sophisticated understanding of needs and expectations underpins mutually beneficial relationships with customers
  • The voice of the customer is a strong influence on development of products, services and processes
  • The business consistently fulfils customer needs through outstanding products and services.

Deliver Products and Services:

  • Products and services are designed to meet customers’ needs and also to exploit the business’s operational strengths
  • Process capabilities and performance are measured and managed as drivers for continuous improvement
  • Processes are lean, and constantly reviewed to continue to drive out all forms of waste
  • Equipment layout is a positive enabler of flexibility, responsiveness and the leanness of processes
  • Flow is smooth and synchronised with demand. The business is highly flexible, promising and delivering short lead times
  • Material is processed in batch-sizes of one (or in batches equal to the smallest quantity in which any customer ever orders the product) without having to compromise on efficiency or timeliness
  • All areas are clean, orderly and self-maintained. The premises are always ‘tour ready’
  • The business and its suppliers are mutually-supportive partners.

Manage Customer Service:

  • All customer interactions, even those that occur unconventionally, are delivered with excellence. The approach to service recovery delights customers, reinforcing loyalty and willingness to recommend
  • The business makes highly effective use of electronic means to deliver parts of its service, and to allow customers and others to interact online
  • Customer satisfaction measurement, and deployment of lessons learned, is sophisticated –a driver for product/service/process innovation.

Effective and efficient functioning of the Operating Processes is enabled by the organisation’s Management and Support Processes. Their status is analysed in this chart.

The PROBE Team’s scores for all questions relating to Management and Support Processes are shown in Appendix 2.

Develop and Manage People:

In a world class business:

  • There is a culture for excellence throughout the business
  • The business respects the people it employs, supporting them in their work and wellbeing, and others it affects
  • The business fully understands and maximises the ‘return on investment’ that it achieves through people development.

Manage Assets and Finance:

  • Advanced financial management is an enabler of the smooth running and development of the business
  • The business invests strategically in assets and systems that enhance its ability to deliver sustainable excellence
  • It is a sophisticated user of information and systems, exploiting ICT’s ability to support new ways of doing business
  • Effective maintenance of equipment is an enabler of work flow, productivity, flexibility, product quality and customer service.

Develop Sustainability of the Business and Society:

  • The business does well by doing good, obtaining substantial business benefits through its focus on corporate responsibility and environmental, social and economic sustainability
  • It is very thorough in managing the whole life value and impact of its products, services and activities
  • It plays a major part in activities that contribute to community-wide progress towards a sustainable society
  • Energy and water usage are at exemplary low levels, with 100% drawn from sustainable sources. The business’s finances benefit substantially from this low consumption
  • The business produces minimal waste, all of which is recycled in natural systems.

Manage Knowledge, Improvement and Change:

  • The business uses a focused, balanced scorecard of indicators to monitor key aspects of performance and to drive innovation
  • It recognises and manages the value of explicit and tacit knowledge as components of its organisational capabilities
  • Management of change is exemplary and highly effective.

Some comments may be added here regarding key points relating to the strengths and opportunities for improvement relating to the Operating Processes and Management and Support Processes

The Manufacturing Insights Framework provides an additional, specifically manufacturing-focused perspective on the business’s practices and processes.

LEADERSHIP / QUALITY PRACTICE

Some comments may be added here if appropriate

SUSTAINABLE OPERATIONS / LEAN OPERATIONS

Some comments may be added here if appropriate

INNOVATION

Some comments may be added here if appropriate

Baseline Capability: our actual and potential momentum for sustainable excellence

As well as providing a snapshot of today’s status, PROBE analyses the capability and momentum for continuing improvement that are evident in the business’s current practices.

The arrow on the chart represents, on the horizontal scale, the capability and momentum for improvement that is demonstrated within today’s business practices. This is XX% of the maximum level represented by PROBE’s aspirational benchmarks.

For illustration purposes, the rate at which the business is improving its performance is assumed to be equivalent to the level of capability and momentum in practice improvement. This assumption may not be correct – the business may like to consider how much evidence it has regarding the true rate of improvement of its performancerelated to excellence.

The PROBE Facilitator may add some comments to this section. For example, a comment such as this may sometimes be appropriate: “This chart suggests that Business Name, like many organisations in 2012, has work to do to establish the momentum that will enable it to make rapid progress towards sustainable business excellence.”

Optionally, the report may include an explanation of how the level of Capability and Momentum for Improvement has been estimated. This is based on a combination of the indices that represent the status of one of the business’s Operating Processes and one of its Management and Support Processes:

  • Develop vision and strategy
  • Manage knowledge, improvement and change

Compelling Vision: what can we achieve and contribute?

A critical component of the business’s ongoing progress is its ability to develop, share, pursue and renew a compelling vision of its own future and contribution. Only with such a vision in place can the business 'backcast' from the vision to better understand the gaps that it needs to bridge, and to identify, plan and implement actions that will move it forwards. Only with a clear vision in place can the business judge the contribution of current developments to its progress towards that future.