High Profile

Case Study: Siemens NZ

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering. A $10 billion enterprise, the company employs over 430,000 people worldwide. Siemens focuses in the energy and healthcare sectors providing product development and manufacturing services.

From design to installation, complex systems and projects have been deployed for over 160 years. Siemens stands for technical achievement, innovation, quality, reliability and global reach.

Siemens has been one of New Zealand’s most reliable and trusted brands since 1876. It provides diverse technology based solutions specialising in the areas of energy, water, healthcare, mobility, productivity, safety, security and the environment.

Water, energy and the environment cover wastewater services, power generation, transmission and distribution with extension into energy-efficient buildings and creating renewable energy technology.  

The Challenge

As a large company with offices and sites around the country Siemens faced increasing challenges managing customer corrective actions in a co-ordinated and efficient way. Historically, its reporting system provided no overview for senior management of what issues had been closed out or if complaints were being dealt with appropriately. Using a mainframe based system, all reporting was handled conventionally and documents including audit reports, manuals, spreadsheet applications and word processing were distributed manually. All information was stored on PCs at individual sites.

While compliance is about all the rules, regulations and legislative requirements that dictate how a company functions, quality management is about ensuring you comply with the rules while making a quality product. With quality management systems there are pre-requisites and standards you have to meet. Both processes require a large quantity of information to be available on a regular basis to ensure processes are adhered to and standards maintained or exceeded.

According to Siemens NZ Quality Manager Alan May there was no dedicated system across the company for dealing with either compliance or quality and the volume of data generated was large and distributed.

"Everyone created their own systems and no-one else would have access to data as information was filed on individual PCs. A significant amount of time was being spent collating information and building reports from that data."

In addition to the time spent looking for information, Siemens faced another challenge. All companies have obligations under the Health & Safety act for reporting accidents promptly or they face penalties, including potential criminal prosecution. Siemens NZ reporting was done on an ad-hoc paper-based system with information stored at random. This created the potential for important information to either be lost, or take too long to reach the relevant parties.

This exposed the company to significant risk in the event of serious accident. Delays or failure to manage a serious accident properly poses financial burdens including legal defense and brand damage control.

Siemens NZ also required a more efficient means of co-ordinating the audit process between different sites and for the overall company. All auditing was paper-based and historically, each site had its own inspection system. And without a unified document management system, information retrieval was slow and unreliable.

The Requirements

Increase Compliance Confidence: Siemens NZ wanted a software solution that would improve compliance reporting. They wanted a dedicated system accessible to all staff through a web-browser. As compliance reporting has different strands that are relevant to different aspects of the company, the system had to be able to process and generate specific responses from a wide range of information.

Siemens NZ began with the High Profile’s FICS Health & Safety module and as the first generation software delivered tangible benefits the functionality continues to be expanded.

Quality Manager Alan May says that once staff began logging corrective actions into the FICS system each action immediately became transparent.

"It was evident immediately what the issue was, what corrective action was needed and who was responsible for carrying out that action."

The FICS process made it possible to communicate back to the customer as every step of every action was tracked and logged.

The software also included the ability to set up automatic notifications for managers of different levels of responsibility within the company. If there had been a serious accident, senior executives would have been immediately notified.

Improve Audit Efficiency:

Siemens NZ wanted a more efficient audit process to automatically generate and send regular reports to specific people. Each manager had specific interests with differing reporting events demanding flexibility in the report definition.

Most importantly, the company wanted polite software. A complicated system increases the potential for human error so it wanted an interface with a more intuitive dashboard.

The Results

As a result of the FICS system implementation, Siemens NZ increased its customer satisfaction score by 23% over a three year period. Customers are getting the information they want when they want it. Siemens NZ is able to respond more quickly because it has the information to hand.

FICS revolves around corrective actions. All the different modules are designed to raise corrective actions. These corrective actions solve real operational problems, maintain their visibility and escalate when required until resolution is achieved. This drives continual business process improvement.

Since incorporating the FICS system into its business processes, Siemens NZ has experienced a 75% reduction in corrective actions. Previously the scattered reporting hid the reality of the true cost of unattended corrective actions. But once these actions became part of the FICS system an awareness was created. This also highlighted issues that weren’t being dealt with.

Having the FICS software has contributed to Siemens being awarded its ISO9001 and ISO 14001 standards. And it played a large role in Siemens gaining ACC Tertiary Accreditation.

Quality Manager Alan May says the FICS system gave the company an advantage in these audit processes as auditors responded so positively to the system.

"It was possible to sit down with the auditors and show every relevant bit of information such as meeting minutes, any follow up, cost savings and workflow systems. FICS provided a quality management system that gave us information at our finger tips. We no longer needed spreadsheets spread out left, right and centre."

The FICS system allowed users access to the central data base to view information that was relevant to them be it compliance, health and safety or business process related.

Alan May says the improvements are evidence that people responded to a system that met their needs.

"The FICS software has great usability. You are basically being lead to the next step and you don’t have to think too hard about what the next step is."

The user friendly software also proved to be a driver of culture change within the company.

"It makes you honest," says Alan May. "It changes the culture in the sense that because things don’t go away someone has to take action as corrective actions are automatically assigned to someone from an audit. Traditionally meeting minutes would indicate who was delegated the responsibility for an action. These could disappear without anything being done. With FICS it doesn’t go away. Everyone can see that you’ve got actions against your name and that things are overdue. The system is very transparent and no action goes away until the record is closed. Things therefore get done and the end result is that you improve your business."