Railway Systems Lean Manufacturing
Management Operating System increases control and accelerates productivity
- 3 minutes read
Our client is a global rail technology and engineering company. Its Brisbane multi-project facility designs, manufactures, installs, and commissions signalling systems and related technologies for rail, transit, and freight networks. Final assembly is completed locally using specialised components supplied from group factories in Italy, France, the USA, and Japan.
Sustained demand across multiple complex infrastructure programs was overburdening the site, putting schedules and budgets at risk. A digital planning and control tool was also struggling due to limited experience with integrated management systems and structured daily routines. Building on prior successful turnarounds of major rail industry projects, our client’s leadership team engaged ORBIZ to implement Lean manufacturing principles to restore operational control, increase stability, and accelerate productivity.
This program helped our manufacturing teams establish more structure and discipline throughout our value stream. ORBIZ worked closely with our teams to ensure the new processes introduced were practical, well understood, and adopted by the people who used them. We have observed stronger operational discipline, clearer accountability, and a growing culture of continuous improvement
DM, Senior Construction Manager, Global Rail Systems & Technology Manufacturer
15%
The approach
An assessment of the site’s management system highlighted five key issues:
- Weak production planning and control
- Inconsistent daily management routines
- Limited production readiness discipline
- Fragmented quality assurance processes
- Disorganised workplace and poorly defined production processes
Together, these issues created significant inefficiency and variability, leaving leaders in a reactive cycle of managing daily disruptions rather than proactively controlling performance.
ORBIZ co-designed a Management Operating System that integrated Lean practices with the client’s digital planning and control platform, aiming to strengthen leadership control, improve daily production readiness, stabilise flow, and embed closed-loop quality management to lift reliability and sustain performance gains.
The solutions
The new Management Operating System implemented six integrated and reinforcing principles:
- Production control: Established a production control centre to visualise daily and weekly plans, performance to plan, and key metrics, supported by standard daily management and escalation.
- Leadership routines: Introduced structured and standardised leadership routines and tiered meetings to improve alignment, accountability, and decision-making.
- Production readiness: Embedded a daily production readiness process to prepare materials, tools, resources, and information pre-shift, and defined a production support role to sustain flow.
- Workplace organisation: Deployed 5S principles and a streamlined production layout with point-of-use improvements, and visual management with sustainment routines to increase production efficiency and workplace safety.
- Quality assurance: Implemented a closed-loop quality system with stage gates, defect classification, escalation, and root-cause analysis resolution.
- Continuous improvement: Developed a structured CI process to prioritise and deliver improvements while building local capability.
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