Welcome to the first edition of OPEX, the Meggitt Production System journal of record. As many of OPEX’s readers already know, gemba is the Japanese word for ‘the real place’. In Lean terminology it means ‘where the value is created’. For Meggitt, like all manufacturing companies, that place is the shopfloor, where everything our customers really value about us finds its purest expression.

Meggitt Production System—our single, global approach to the application of Lean tools and practices—is now being rolled out worldwide. Its job is to make sure that everything we do, and everyone who does it, is dedicated to supporting ‘the makers’. In a real sense, as Meggitt Avionics Production Manager Lee Barnes affirms on page six, MPS implementation has meant turning Meggitt upside down—managers, team leaders, production supervisors, all now work ‘for’ the shopfloor. It has meant rebuilding the organisation around what we call Daily Layered Accountability, a structure of interlocking early morning meetings which constantly spotlight the real reason Meggitt exists—to make world-beating products. But most of all it has meant creating a culture that not only enables the shopfloor to call the shots, but encourages it to.

Like MCS Corona, Meggitt Training Systems, Atlanta, Securaplane and MSS Fribourg, Meggitt Avionics is among the factories already living with MPS. The response there has been extraordinary. People at all levels speak of having been reconnected with the true value of their work; of feeling heard for the first time; of being freed to really care about what they do and how they could do it better. In the coming pages Meggitt Avionics staff and managers explain in their own words what MPS means to them.

Amir Allahverdi
Group Operations Director