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View from the Top - Part 2 |
Part 1
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COMPANY FILE
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ABRO – formerly the Army Base Repair
Organisation – is a service, repair and re-manufacturing
organisation offering a worldwide capability to defence,
emergency service, local government and general industrial
organisations. It has around 2,500 staff.
Its large-scale repair and overhaul
capabilities range from small arms to battle tanks,
from motorcycles to commercial vehicles, and from binoculars
to thermal imaging equipment. ABRO also offers a fleet
management service.
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Q: HOW DID THE USERS REACT TO BEING MADE TO WORK THE WAY
THE SOFTWARE WORKED?
A: It was funny, I honestly didn’t think at the beginning
that we’d get there, in terms of timing or not modifying the
software.
But there were two good things – the existing systems were
pretty awful so the user community wasn’t arguing to keep
them, people were up for change.
Also the timescale was at the back of everyone’s minds. ABRO
reports to the Minister of State for the Armed Forces and
the project plan was announced in Parliament. Because of other
public sector IT failures, people were keeping a pretty close
eye on it and any failures on our part would have been reported
to the House!
The dilemma in implementing was how much to change business
practices, versus putting the system in and making changes
afterwards. Given the time we had, the number one aim was
just to get the system in, so it’s now that we are coming
back and ‘doing the best practice’.
We did bring in some lean processes, and in a repair organisation
some of this is quite alien. But now the last site is live,
we are in the process of re-examining our processes, on the
basis that it is much easier to introduce lean processes when
all the sites are using the same system.
More...
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Conspectus 2005
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Copyright © 2005
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