Biography
Simon has a passion for leading teams to achieve business results.
He has much experience of problem solving having led over 100 root cause investigation teams over 20 years to find cause of technical problems in Rolls-Royce. From this experience, Simon developed new methods to find cause, based not on theory or text books but on previous experience when things didn't go well. These new methods dramatically reduced the time to find cause and gave much greater certainty as to the root cause. He then spread these methods across Rolls-Royce globally and was described as Rolls-Royce's Global expert on Root Cause Analysis/Problem Solving.
Separately, Simon devised an approach to process improvement (unrelated to root cause analysis) that is psychologically, not tools based. The key element to this is the recognition that the people who work in processes day in day out are experts. Thus, in leading process improvement, Simon facilitates a simple structure whilst not seeing himself as the expert on the process being improved. Teams generate very simply an understanding in detail of the current process, what process problems there are and generate their own ideas for improvement which they themselves implement. When the teams implement improvements, they are making dramatic changes yet because the ideas are theirs, they enjoy making change. People don't resist change, they resist being changed. Simon creates an environment where people motivate themselves with powerful results. Examples include the doubling of the capacity of an internal grind machine in two days and a 36% reduction in time to operate an office process.
Also at Rolls-Royce, Simon was a Lean Specialist leading Value Stream Mapping, 5S, Set Up Reduction and Cell Design workshops
Prior to this Simon worked for Nissan's Tyne and Wear factory. For seven years he was in Quality Assurance aligned to product quality in service. Simon gained a wealth of very useful experience in problem solving. He also led product quality improvement based on market research, where a sample of customers were interviewed by telephone, and quality problems captured and prioritised. Countermeasures then implemented were tested by customers for effectiveness by subsequent customer interviews on counter-measured cars. This halved the average number of faults per car and was business critical - market research established that the top three reasons why people bought Nissans related to product quality.
At Nissan, Simon also very much enjoyed working in the training department for three years, delivering various training courses to Nissan's training standards e.g. Leadership, Teamwork (outward bound in the Lakes), Problem Solving, Decision making, Presentation Skills, Training Techniques, Effective Meeting Skills...
Other positions Simon has held are Quality Manager at Rover, consultant at Kaizen Institute and a secondary school Maths teacher.
Simon has a General Science degree (mostly Maths and Engineering subjects), a Masters Degree in Quality Management and is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.
Simon is married with two children, 19 and 21 years old.