How the Smiths Excellence System has transformed business travel at Smiths

At Smiths our in-house programme of continuous improvement is known as the Smiths Excellence System (SES). This goes beyond leadership and process improvement; it is about inspiring and empowering our people, creating opportunities for us to grow, reach our potential, and advance our careers.

I am proud to highlight one of our Black Belt alumni, William Rollo, who truly exemplifies the programme’s purpose of developing the skills and mindset necessary for tackling complex challenges. 

The term ‘Black Belt’ refers to our SES team members who build and develop practical application of lean methods to help increase business productivity, working to deliver impactful, business-critical projects. They encapsulate the very essence of continuous improvement.

William’s journey at Smiths demonstrates how the Black Belt programme fosters talent and drives impactful change, contributing to both personal and organisational growth. Hear below from William directly on one of his most impactful programmes – a radical overhaul of our company’s travel system.

Travel is something we can all relate to and here at Smiths business travel is core to our primary purpose in serving our customers.

We serve customers in over 50 countries, and this requires us to put boots on the ground and keep a close connection with our customers, be it through providing and installing cutting edge engineering solutions through to the essential aftermarket service and support we provide.

That is why we are focussed on providing our colleagues with the right infrastructure to travel safely and perform these critical duties.

I had the privilege of starting my career in Smiths eight years ago as a manager in the internal audit team, where I spent a few years travelling around many of our operations globally. This gave me great pride in seeing the diversity and scale of our organisation. Above all, my fondest memories were of the great people across Smiths I met along the way.

I took the opportunity in 2022 to join our SES Lean Six Sigma (LSS) Black Belt programme within our Group function to focus on impactful projects that tackle difficult problems and challenges. One such problem we faced was that we did not have a functioning system globally that allows all our colleagues to book and go about necessary business travel.

We initiated a Black Belt project to address a key concern. More than half of our travel arrangements were booked offline either via email or over the phone, which is both costly and time consuming. Using the principles of LSS, this became the core ‘problem statement’ I needed to address, and our objective was to increase the percentage of travel bookings placed online using a travel portal to greater than 80%.

I formed a core team engaging our indirect procurement function with project management support, and began investigating our existing processes that were underperforming. Using a well known lean methodology, I defined four critical success factors (CSF’s) key to the travel programme:

• Safety embedded – Smiths has a duty of care to all its employees, wherever their roles may take them in the course of business.
• Sustainability – at Smiths we take our GHG targets very seriously. Business travel is classified within scope 3 emissions.
• A simple and easy to use solution – we needed to provide a means of booking business travel that was accessible and user-friendly.
• Managing costs – it was also important focus on the costs of travel and the associated agency fees we incur for each trip secured.

In support of this, we partnered with two external agencies to design and provide a globally connected solution for our travellers to plan, book and go about necessary business travel safely.

Now we have over 90% of our travel bookings placed using our new online travel portal. We also now have access to much improved data on the location of our workforce which allows us to provide the duty of care needed in keeping them safe.

We also have better reporting on how we are travelling and the impact this is having on the environment. This is an area we can all have a positive impact on by choosing more sustainable means of travel, and by ensuring we only travel when it is needed.

There were many lessons learned from this project, but most notably is the need to apply a mindset of continuous improvement not just during the project, but also once the project has been completed. There is still much to improve across a service line such as how we manage business travel across Smiths. In aid of this, we have put in place a travel operations team to drive further improvement and address early life challenges associated with the new system and processes.

This year I exited the SES Black Belt Programme and re-entered the business, joining Flex-Tek as a finance director within its construction division. It has been a great experience so far, and I look forward to applying all that I learned with SES to drive further results for Flex-Tek and for Smiths!

Danli Shen is a Master Black Belt for Smiths Group and William Rollo is Finance Director for Flex-Tek, part of Smiths Group.