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Wieke Boon, manager of continuous improvement at Research, Development and Technology (RD&T) at steel company Corus
A Day in the Life of …Wieke Boon, Corus RD&T
This article discusses how Research, Development and Technology (RD&T) at Corus has implemented continuous improvement and strategy deployment schemes before and since the company’s acquisition by Tata Steel. The company had started to implement a continuous improvement strategy in 2004, but the acquisition by Tata Steel saw it being asked to take on a new corporate vision and goals. RD&T’s response was to create a new strategy and deploy that strategy throughout the organisation. The process demands that each part of the RD&T organisation works out how it will contribute to the RD&T strategy and through that contribute to the company’s goals, but is more sophisticated than a simple cascade process.
eIQ Action Points – implementing strategy in R&D organisations
Wieke Boon obtained a MSc in electrical engineering from Delft University of Technology. He joined the planning and engineering department of Hoogovens in IJmuiden (one of the founding fathers of Corus) in 1974, working on projects in almost every plant on the site. He held various positions in project/programme management and departmental management. In 1996 he joined the research and development organisation as department manager for aluminium, iron and steel-making technology. Since the merger he has become responsible for iron-making research in Corus RD&T and related resources in the UK and the Netherlands. In 2006 he joined the Corporate Continuous Improvement (CI) organisation as Director CI and returned to RD&T in 2007, as manager of CI at RD&T.
When Tata Steel of India took over Anglo-Dutch steel giant Corus in April 2007, it was seen by many as a sign of the increasing power of emerging economies. Within the company, the merger appears to have given greater focus to existing efforts to embed a doctrine of continuous improvement and a rigorous adherence to a defined corporate strategy.
Wieke Boon has been at the heart of the transition, helping to install a continuous improvement culture in RD&T and implementing a strategy deployment process to align the research group’s efforts with Tata Steel Group’s vision.
That vision is as follows: Tata Steel Group aspires to be the global steel industry benchmark for value creation and corporate citizenship, making a difference through its people, its offer, its innovative approach and its conduct. The vision led to the following goals for 2012: to increase the return on invested capital from 19% to 30%; to reduce the frequency of injuries; to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from 1.8 tonne per tonne of liquid steel produced to 1.5 tonne by 2020; and to become one of the top 25% of employers in the world.
Corus RD&T had been engaged in a continuous improvement programme since 2004, when it recognised that a lot of the tools and techniques used in manufacturing could be translated into tools for continuous improvement in research.
“Most people realised that the work was important for the future of the company,” said Boon. “And in the first few years there were a number of top-down initiatives and quite a lot of bottom-up ideas.”
The take-over by Tata Steel brought a new vision and culture
The take-over by Tata Steel brought a new vision and culture. The RD&T organisation tried to position itself within the new company by aligning its goals with the Tata Steel vision.
“Almost all the things we were already doing fit well with what Tata Steel wanted, but they gave us a clear target at the corporate level, so we could feel that we were really contributing to the company’s goals,” Boon said.
Setting strategy
Early in 2008, a formal strategy deployment process was developed based on the Tata Steel mission and goals.
“Having a strategy and a strategy deployment approach makes sense if you are very clear about what you want to be,” said Boon. “If you don’t have a goal it doesn’t make sense to talk about strategy.
Strategy is about the choices you make to achieve something
“Strategy is about the choices you make to achieve something. We make clear where we want to go and based on that, make our choices. So once Tata Steel made that clear, the question was how should RD&T contribute?”
According to Boon, the strategy deployment process should be thought of as asking and answering the same question throughout the organisation’s hierarchy: if this is our strategy, how will you contribute to supporting it? The answers from one level set the context for the next level down.
“Strategy deployment offers the opportunity to have discussions with your higher and lower levels and actually decide how you will answer the question,” he said. Although strategy deployment sounds like a cascading process, these broad discussions mean that feedback from teams lower down the hierarchy becomes part of the decision making.
“That makes it different from cascading decisions,” Boon said, “I don’t think there are many waterfalls where water climbs back up again.
It makes strategy deployment so powerful, because everyone is committed
“It makes strategy deployment so powerful, because everyone is committed. People should be able to understand how they fit in with the overall strategy, how what they are doing fits in, and how RD&T contributes to the goals of the company.”
It should also help people work as a team, rather than as a group of individuals .
“That kind of individualism is the risk of a pure cascading approach. If a team member understands how his contribution links in with other contributions and how his team is linked to other teams the total effort can be much more effective.
“We don’t have special mechanisms for feedback between multiple levels of decision-making: we’re doing this for the first time with a formal strategy deployment process, so there is still a lot of reliance on common sense to run the process.”
The strategy deployment process has been implemented in RD&T through a one-day off-site meeting to introduce the idea, followed by a series of half-day meetings to push it forward. Tata Steel set its vision and goals for 2012 and Boon believes the strategy that has been derived from them should carry through that period: “We are installing a yearly management cycle to review strategy every year. If we feel we are not on track or the world is changing then we can check and retune the strategy.”
Open innovation
Will continuous improvement and the strategy deployment process have an impact on the research function’s attitudes to open innovation partnerships?
“We have tried to do high-quality research in the past, which benefits from global co-operation, and that hasn’t changed. But within a strategy deployment process you can try to be more explicit about it. If you set your strategy as ‘collaborating on research projects’, the question to the next level down is ‘how will you collaborate?’ This means that managers must be more explicit about the areas of technology that are suitable for collaboration and the best institutes and universities to work with.
“In my mind it’s a process of forcing people into making choices, so we don’t accept answers such as ‘I am making a list of relevant universities’ – that is not a quality answer. It should be ‘In these areas of technology, these institutions are worth working with and so those are what I am going to focus upon’.”
“This, in turn, helps with clarity for the next level.”
The idea of clarity, rather than rigour or discipline, is vital
Boon argues that the idea of clarity, rather than rigour or discipline, is vital. He argues that a ‘rigorous’ process may lead people to think that a decision, once made, is fixed. If, instead, managers concentrate on being clear about the reasons behind their decisions, then colleagues will understand what they are trying to achieve and will feel free to bring forward alternative approaches to meeting that goal.
“If people are clear about targets that have been set they can also see new opportunities to contribute to these targets,” he said.
Implementation
Boon’s day to day work is to carry forward the strategy deployment process, introducing it to staff, managers and the rest of the RD&T organisation. He also has a team of continuous improvement coaches who facilitate the process across the organisation.
His other responsibility is to look to the future.
“The current process includes a long-term philosophy about how Corus RD&T should work in 2012, in terms of continuous improvement and strategy deployment. So I need to be thinking about what we can do to reach that as quickly and easily as possible,” he said. “We’re talking about improving the strategy deployment process to make it easier and leaner.”
This means that the CI team is using CI tools as well, trying to improve their support to the organisation.
“We may end up a bit like doctors, learning to take our own medicine,” he said. 
eIQ Action Points
- Consider the company’s vision and goals
- Consider the strategy that senior management set, based on that vision and those goals
- Consider how your organisation fits with that strategy
- Create a process that asks each level of the organisation to say how they’ll contribute to the strategy
- Ensure each level answers with help from people above and below it in the hierarchy, so the responses reflect the immediate context
- Realise that the way in which you decide to contribute to the overall strategy will set the context for how others support you in doing so
- Be clear in your decisions and your reasons for them, so that others understand what you’re trying to achieve and how
- Recognise that such a rigorous internal process may spread out into relationships with external organisations
- Be prepared to take your own medicine - by finding better ways to implement strategy