London Midland Trains

London Midland operates train services through the heart of England from London in the south, to Birmingham in the midlands and Liverpool in the north west. With 46 million passenger journeys each year, performance is high on the London Midland agenda.

Excellence journey

In August 2008, they decided to commence their excellence journey by applying for Committed to Excellence (C2E) with Performance Quality Manager, Jamie Green at the helm. The first stage was a self assessment that took place away from the workplace and involved a cross-section of 12 staff from different levels within the company. It is important to involve a cross section of staff as this ensures a balanced view in terms of strengths and areas for improvement identified.

The self assessment was facilitated by three internal staff, including one Accredited European Assessor. Strengths identified from the workshop included data collection being used to improve policy, strategy and performance; a comprehensive process audit system and well segmented key performance data. Three improvement plans were then selected based on deliverability and potential benefit to the business. London Midland chose the following projects:

• Setting up a good practice forum
• Deploying a process linking managements objectives to overall business strategy
• A review of the use of internal data and reporting formats

Site visit

The site visit was conducted in July 2009 by validator Dave Richards. Mr Richards found that the three improvement projects selected met the C2E requirements for RADAR, and consequently London Midland were awarded C2E status for a two year period. The feedback report outlined a number of observations made during the site visit including:

• Evidence of strong leadership commitment
• Well structured project documentation
• Systematic deployment
• Regular project reviews and documentation

"We found the C2E process to be very worthwhile as it delivered real improvements in three key areas of our business. It is a great place to start your excellence journey. We have adopted the Excellence Model as our performance improvement framework and have already started preparing for a full assessment when we move on the next level - Recognised for Excellence".
Jamie Green, Quality Performance Manager, London Midland

"The Levels of Excellence is very popular in the rail sector today, and it is very pleasing to have London Midland on board. They are clearly committed to performance improvement and have trained up a good number of assessors as they progress to Recognised for Excellence next year. The challenge now is to maintain the momentum generated from the C2E process."
Levels of Excellence Manager, BQF

Find out more

For more details about C2E and the EFQM Levels of Excellence programme, please call Ian Swain on 020 7654 5009 or contact us online.

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