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In order to maintain its competitive edge, the company has wholeheartedly embraced change, particularly over the past ten years, with this dynamic process underpinned by the use of a Business Excellence Model as a frame of reference. Today the Group employs around 1500 people at sites in Wales, England, The Netherlands, France and Turkey and has a turnover of close to a billion pounds. The manufacturing lines are world-class with highly trained and educated work teams producing world-beating products. The Group is accredited to Investors In People, Det Norsk Veritas ISRS Level 5 and Lloyds Register QS9000. Corus Colors supplies organic coated pre-finished steels on cold reduced or metallic coated substrates, depending their use, backed up with services such as engineering solutions, supply chain management and end product development. It supplies the construction and domestic appliance sectors, amongst others, offering each a tailored solution to improve both products and processes. The construction sector is mainly served from the Shotton site, established over 100 years ago; while the consumer products division is based at the Tafarnaubach Works in South Wales. A visit to either of the two sites will give a valuable insight into the company philosophy of continuous improvement to ensure customer satisfaction and bottom line results. Each visit will cover three aspects of the business management process: · Use of the Business Excellence Model as a review mechanism to direct learning and improvement activities · Teamworking and Empowerment · Health and Safety Since 1996 Corus Colors has been using the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) Excellence Model, which helps to identify best practice seen in leading companies across Europe. The information from self assessment and benchmarking has been incorporated into Corus Colors' business planning, to link high level business plans and scorecards with Departmental, Team and Individual objectives, to ensure the best use of resources. When approaching the issues surrounding Teamworking and Empowerment, Corus again benchmarked itself against the best in industry and adopted elements of best practice into its own teamworking structure. According to Ray Wells, Manager, Total Quality, the results speak for themselves with improvements in business results year on year. “Indeed, we won the People Development prize at the recent 2003 Wales Quality Awards, which we saw as an external recognition of the hard work that has been invested in the development of the workforce. In parallel with these initiatives, the company also saw dramatic improvements on the Health & Safety front where accident frequency rates have been driven down to their lowest ever levels by various initiatives and a ‘Safe Behaviour’ programme. Again Corus Colors studies world-class organisations scoring highly in the International Safety Rating System (ISRS) in order to formulate its own Health & Safety plan. In its drive to reduce accidents, its strategies have evolved through three distinct stages: 1. Physical – guarding, walkways, etc. 2. Procedures – buy-in by workers into the best way to do things 3. Behavioural – what makes people take risks and go against safety procedures? Corus is working with the Kiel Centre in Edinburgh in this latter phase, which has just started. Key to all of the above best practice activity is the belief by management that to achieve continual improvement, satisfy clients and make money, companies need to employ highly motivated and competent people. “At the end of the day, it sounds glib, but you can’t enjoy customer satisfaction and bottom line results unless your workforce delivers the service and products that your customers are happy with,” said Ray Wells. “I hope that anyone visiting our sites will appreciate our commitment to these principles in educating and motivating our workforce and maintaining the success of our company.” |
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