RΣ-THINKING  LEAN  #3

Insights Natacha Jushko

Dive into Christophe Rubbens’ journey, where he faced a formidable challenge: overseeing railway infrastructures at the heart of the network with the support of hundreds of collaborators, despite lacking technical expertise and on-the-ground know-how. Explore how, by embracing Lean Management, he not only enhanced service quality but also instilled a culture of continuous improvement within the organization.

Trained in a technical background, Christophe took on the role of maintaining railway infrastructures in 2014. Confronted with this significant challenge, he opted to develop his human skills over technical ones, adopting a human-centric approach to Lean Management aligned with his philosophy.

Exploring Human Lean: While managing railway infrastructure maintenance without technical mastery, Christophe quickly realized he faced other significant challenges, such as navigating bureaucratic processes and overcoming resistance to change. He chose to explore the human aspects rather than drowning in technical complexity. Through extensive readings, he discovered a reflective and participative Lean, aligned with the agile culture desired by the company. This marked a departure from the denatured, Taylorized, normative, and prescriptive Lean, focusing solely on its operational dimension.

“I didn’t aim to become a technical expert. Instead, I embraced Lean Management true to its original philosophy. These Lean concepts became my guides in this professional adventure.”

Thus, Lean concepts became the cultural pillars of organizational transformation. To translate these concepts into his work, Christophe conceived the idea of creating a metaphorical factory to implement them.

The Sillons Factory Serving Customer Satisfaction: This gave rise to the concept of the “Sillons Factory.” In railway terms, a “sillon” represents the infrastructure capacity needed to move a specific train from one point to another at a given time—meaning the period during which a specific infrastructure is dedicated to the circulation of a train between two points in the network. Each train thus moves from one “sillon” to another, from its starting point to its destination. Customer satisfaction is guaranteed when circulation is smooth. Monitoring travel time within each “sillon,” the quality indicator, is crucial, and the next “sillon” must be available as soon as a train leaves the previous one. It is, therefore, an intangible production chain facilitating the transition from manufacturing theory to practice.

The Change Projects: Christophe initiated several projects with the ambition to surpass the assigned quality level by:

• Adopting Servant Leadership, focusing on supporting collaborators in a humble posture.
• Promoting participatory approaches, considering all human skills beyond technical expertise.
• Deploying Kaizen (continuous improvement), viewing mistakes as opportunities for improvement.
• Seeking Gemba, the place where work truly happens, and value for customers is created. An iterative quest led to an artificial Gemba to make it enriching. Initial field experiences faced risks and time pressure, making it impossible to question without putting staff in difficulty. Thus, a secure environment was established, not precisely reflecting reality but allowing everyone to share, observe, analyze, and question daily operations, understand difficulties, and collectively enhance them. Learning-sharing moments became a source of pride in their profession and recognition for the involved collaborators.
• Revising investment priorities by mapping and weighing proposals based on past negative consequences and expected benefits in terms of quality for customers.

These participatory initiatives genuinely transformed the organization. Thanks to these efforts, the quality of service to users exceeded expectations. Within a few years, measured quality was twice as good, demonstrating that placing the human at the center paves the way for innovative solutions.