The Starting Point

The Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins Beneath One's Feet

Over recent times, the pressure to improve profitability has magnified considerably. In order to achieve this objective in a sustainable manner, it is vital to aggressively drive down cost and increase productivity through waste elimination (waste being defined as any activity that adds cost but no value to the product) The primary objective of the World Class Manufacturing (WCM) program, in Lagos Brewery, was to enable us achieve the above objectives through the adoption of the appropriate World Class Manufacturing tools and techniques and the initiation of a change management program.

A diagnostic study was carried out by BIC – Business Improvement Consultants. This answered questions such as: Where are we? Where would we like to be? What is the gap to fill? And, What do we need to do to fill this gap? The output of this was a business case, which enabled us to make the Go/No-Go decision. At around the same time, the decision was also made to include Lagos brewery in the second wave of the TPM initiative driven by HTS. It was agreed that WCM would be the main improvement “umbrella” under which other initiatives, such as TPM, will be placed. We can therefore call our WCM, TPM plus.

At this point, we also agreed that due to the magnitude of the task in hand and in order to ensure success, we needed to provide the required level of resources and expertise. An external consultancy, by the name of BIC - Business Improvement Consultants, a UK based operational improvement consultancy with a demonstrable track record of implementing sustainable productivity improvements in numerous multi-national companies worldwide, and who have been undertaking a similar program in Ibadan Brewery over the past 16 months was selected as our partner in this venture.

The Awareness and TPM Coordinators’ training workshops were attended in Holland and we then started the mobilization phase. During the mobilization phase, we agreed on a number of KPIs, which were going to be used to track the rate of progress, together with baselines, targets and due dates. Teams were selected, presentations were made to all personnel in packaging, engineering and stores and project plans were created.



Sokan Adediran 

WCM Coordinator

 Lagos Brewery - Nigerian Breweries PLC