tesco is a world leader in delivering best practice throughout the supply chain to stay ahead of our competition we need to focus on doing two things firstly we have to implement a common operating model across the tesco group and that allows us to leverage the accumulated expertise of tesco for the benefit of all the businesses throughout the world secondly we need to stretch ourselves to innovate to find new and better ways of doing things to become more efficient and that's where lean six sigma comes in innovation doesn't grow on trees it's born out of people's imagination lean six sigma gives people a tool kit to innovate analyze and develop new and better ways of working this video will show how some of our colleagues who have completed lean six sigma training have put their new skills into practice you'll see how it's changed the way they and their teams work and the benefit it's brought to tesco i was asked to build a plan for how we could make savings against our budgets in store for cleaning security expenses and consumables what we call in the office goods and services not for resale this was a great opportunity for me to put to the test some of the tools i learned in my black belt training specifically kaizen workshops and identifying business process waste the key to getting these events right was to make sure we always took a structured logical approach to finding process improvements and to make sure we had all the right people there right from customer assistance to buyers store managers and all the way up to operations directors we were looking for non-value ad activity which is things that we do that customers don't value and we as a business don't value an example of this is that we found we spent nearly three million pounds every year paying local authorities to remove our trolleys from rivers and canals we're now working to reduce this by making sure we've got the right retention systems in place for example magnetic wheel locks and bollards to stop trolleys being taken off site by listening to stakeholders at all levels of the business we're now in a great position to make sustainable changes to the way that we do things at tesco none out the back originated when we had a focus on our inventory levels or stock holding the main problems we identified were that the stock hadn't been put on the shelf by the replenishment teams the stock records in the ordering system being incorrect and the system not knowing about the stock also the shelf capacity in the ordering system could sometimes be incorrect leaving the system to think that we could hold more than was actually physically possible to be held on the shelf this project has been such a success and a breakthrough we've had a reduction in inventory in stockholding for tesco we've also had multi-million pound savings in wasted time people taking stock on and off the shop floor so our productivity of our staff has improved the customers have seen benefits and availability with more products being on the shelf rather than sat in the warehouse and the staff response has been amazing the world palette project came directly from feedback from our store staff value stream mapping allowed my colleagues and i to understand the end-to-end palette journey by collaborating with us suppliers and listening to our customers we're able to incorporate their overall requirements into the design of this world palette it's dual purpose so it's both a pallet and a dolly this allows it to work all the way through the supply chain from the supplier into depot and straight onto the shop floor it enables us to build merchandisable units of high volume product that makes replenishment simpler at tesco the objective for trains from spain was three things speed quality and cost so cheaper transport faster transport and better quality produce for our customers this orange is special in two ways it's fresher and has a smaller carbon footprint we've achieved this by having a modal shift in transport we've moved from trucks to trains in spain this orange is kicked in the field goes to the pack house and from there onto the train goes directly to our depot then to our stores applying the lean six sigma principles we achieve the lead time reduction from five days down to four we've only been able to achieve this by working collaboratively and closely with our growers and suppliers in spain the end result better fresher quality produce for our customers i lead a programmer work on hard lines where we initially got three broad objectives to reduce back stock to improve availability and to make processes simpler for stores we started by mapping every single process in store for stock control and replenishment we then set up a kaizen style workshop which was cross-functional with store ordering commercial distribution all of whom worked to identify variability waste and non-value-added activities in those processes the result is that we're going to roll out new ways of working across hard lines and across all stores by the end of the year and that will be supported by strong central improvements for our staff every team i work with now has someone who's completed the lean six in my training and they in turn are training and mentoring other people within the team we now all speak a common language and we deliver better projects to our stores and customers in tesco we're absolutely passionate about developing and nurturing the future leaders of our business and i believe this training is world class we're giving our people the opportunity to think creatively using this toolkit whilst maintaining their focus on better simpler and cheaper solutions we want to give all of our people from project managers to sponsors on the main board the tools and techniques that they need to improve the efficiency of the operation and keep us ahead of the competition you