Making sense of opportunities in building material production

• Purpose – Breakthrough improvement requires management decisions, which indicates that making sense of existing opportunities is important. This is a particular challenge when the improvement is a possibility and not a problem. The purpose of this paper is to propose the practice of doing an Opportunity Study as the way to create a sense of management urgency for realising dormant possibilities.Design/methodology/approach – A process-based Opportunity Study is presented consisting of a Diagnosing-Analysing-Solving (DAS) approach. Benchmarks are defined and compared with the actual performance resulting in a quantifiable improvement potential (D). Main causes are analysed (A), which leads to proposed solutions (S). The Opportunity Study practice is applied to a cement milling process, a cement plant and a supply network for cement-based building products.Findings – Results indicate that applying DAS methodology highlights realisable opportunities in all of the studied cases. This seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient criterion to create a sense of urgency for facts based change.Research limitations/implications – The results indicate that there is need for further research for looking at the process of sense making and to what extent facts alone can drive change initiatives.Practical implications – Results indicate that by a simple review, focusing on what a system can do instead of which the problems are, valuable opportunities for improvement could be detected.Originality/value – The paper highlights the value of focusing on opportunities.

Keyword

Opportunity Study

Process-based systems

Process dimension

Process model

Engineering Science with specialization in industrial engineering and management

Teknisk fysik med inriktning mot industriell teknik

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)