Abudawood Group
Case Study on a 100% Tailor-Made Simulation
Name of the company: Abudawood Group - Founded in 1935
- Active in 6 different countries in Middle East and North Africa
- Approximately 5000 employees
- Industry: Distribution, Supply Chain and Logistics services
The Challenges
As the Abudawood Group is a big company with many departments, one major challenge has been developed: due to over-focusing on their departments, the employees showed a certain silo-thinking. Also the overall corporate business targets were not achieved. That ended in a lost of wasted time trying to resolve problems due to misaligning functional goals with strategic goals. The bottom line was affected due to operational inefficiencies and losses.
What were the challenges that were addressed by the initiative?
Abudawood Group had undergone major changes. It grew from a single country operation with Sales of below 500MM USD and 700 employees to over 2,500 MM USD and 4000+ employees operating in 6 countries in a span of 11 years. The business results were still strong, but the company was beginning to see key misses in operational efficiency and effectiveness.
That is why they wanted to return to a collaborative multifunctional interrelated business, because personal
and departmental priorities seemed to take over.
Samir Ishak - Vice President Operations
Our Head of IT and logistics at the time saw the desperate need for process optimization in our Supply Chain Operations. He was also a strong believer in gamification and simulation. We were introduced to SIMDUSTRY® via a sister training company and saw that they had experience and knowledge in building relevant simulations that could enable us to achieve our goals.
Hazem El Banna - Information Technology and Supply Chain Director
The toughest change we were aiming to achieve was to enable the biggest
number of employees to become problem solvers, for this change to happen
employees needed to understand the roles/activities carried out by their
departments in addition other departments, hence breaking the silo mentality.
In order to initiate the change process from working in silos to employees who understand how to work across an end-to-end process and solve problems or recommend better ways to speed up the work and make it more efficient, we needed a partner who can build a tailor-made simulation that is specific to how our process works, with all the roles, tasks, activities, policies and procedures. SIMDUSTRY® customer interaction model, and working from scratch to build a simulation with us (instead of trying to push something that was previously developed) made them the perfect business change partner.
The Solutions
How did the work look like?
Duration: 2 Days
Target Group: Managers and Employees
In order to solve the above mentioned challenges, the Abudawood Group tried to find a solution that could put together “The Journey of a case” – as the project was called at Abudawood Group. After a long period of mind mapping and thinking, the Abudawood Group came up with the idea to work with SIMDUSTRY®. The Abudawood Group gave SIMDUSTRY® the task to design and develop a tailor-made simulation detailing the Abudawood Group business process from end to end.
The idea behind it was: With the help of a tailor-made simulation all the Abudawood Group employees should be empowered to learn deeply about the internal business process by understanding the role of every single department. Also, while playing the board game, the employees should understand how the process should work in an ideal scenario.
Samir Ishak - Vice President Operations
SIMDUSTRY® took the time to listen and understand our situation. They spent time with our Head of Logistics and IT to learn more about the operational concerns and physically took the time to review our operation in the warehouse technicians and operators and in our offices. They spent time with our Head of Learning and Development who expanded the scope of work from Supply Chain to include the entire Value Chain of the company. The discussions were not just about what the solution would look like but also the most effective development and delivery mechanics of “Journey of a case.” As this scope grew, SIMDUSTRY® collaboratively included ALL department Heads in the process to ensure we had buy-in all the way.
SIMDUSTRY® showed an understanding of our needs, an ability to change scope and adapt, and showed the capabilities to bring a solution to life.
Hazem El Banna - Information Technology and Supply Chain Director
SIMDUSTRY® succeeded in engaging employees at all levels and making them part of the solution, which further increased the level of employee commitment during the deployment.
The Outcomes
To understand the Abudawood business process, our SIMDUSTRY® Team flew in to observe and understand the processes from first hand. After understanding the functions and also the challenges of the company, our team started to develop the tailor-made simulation.
Once developed, the tailor-made simulation should be useful to every single employee in the company. After the development phase the SIMDUSTRY® team trained some internal Abudawood Trainers to handle the simulation and train the employees from all levels.
Thanks to the simulation, all multifunctional team members started to sit on the same board to have one single helicopter view of how the business should run with smooth interaction between process links and nods.
The SIMDUSTRY® tailor-made simulation helped Abudawood with breaking of functional silos, finding solutions to problems and implementing them multifunctionally in real life. It also helped to reduce wastes and losses, and to improve operation inefficiencies. While playing this simulation board game, the Abudawood Group could resolve process bottle necks.
Hazem El Banna - Information Technology and Supply Chain Director
employees to see the effort in takes others to carry the work across the
process, and think of solutions on how to improve work flow and overall
process performance, and instead of competing against each other
working together for the benefit of the customers.
When employees understood the effort it takes others to execute on their
output, the interaction between employees was at a lower level of
tension with willingness to help instead of complain and critsize.
Samir Ishak - Vice President Operations
The most important outcome was that people from all facets and levels of the corporation began to understand the Value Chain. This was something we had lost in our quest for growth and in the euphoria of great numerical business results. It was – as our Head of IT and Logistics envisioned – the process optimization and gamification, not just in Supply Chain but on the whole Value Chain. The positive outcome I did not expect was that this “Tailor made board game for Abudawood business processes” became a huge hit with employees. There was a tremendous amount of interest in attending and participating. The enthusiasm level was tremendous. This could never have been accomplished through forums or classroom style lectures. Together with our leadership team SIMDUSTRY® made our Value Chain interesting.
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