Nestlé · Coatepec
Turning a stalled transformation into measured movement — inside Nestlé Continuous Excellence, with the change capability left permanently in-house.
Change management within NCE · Stewarded by The Integral Management Society / IMSV.org
A methodology-rich plant that could not turn strategy into movement — brought back on track, and measured.
(from 0.56 in ~5 months)
(from 64%)
vs. plant history
(measured, not self-report)
Not short of method — short of movement
The client was a Nestlé manufacturing operation in Mexico running inside Nestlé Continuous Excellence (NCE) — the company’s One Model of TPM, Lean and operational pillars, with formal audits and gate assessments.
This was not an organization lacking method. It had Goal Alignment, Leadership Development and Compliance modules, an OMP master plan, Kotter-based change steps and a full TPM apparatus. The difficulty was the one that hides behind a mature methodology stack: strategy was not turning into movement. Change initiatives stalled against resistance, momentum leaked away between the steering committee and the line, and the kind of situation was developing where operational targets and audit readiness come under real pressure.
The brief was deliberately not a motivational intervention. It was to make change actually land and hold — without adding parallel structures, and without creating a long-term dependency on outside consultants.
An ally inside the system, not an auditor on top of it
External change facilitators were engaged, led by the consultant who authored the program’s reference procedure. The role of change management was defined, in NCE’s own language, as «harmonizing our steps on the Common Path (One Model) of Continuous Excellence» — and mapped onto NCE’s foundational modules and the eight Kotter steps, so it reinforced the existing system rather than competing with it. A principle was fixed from day one: stakeholders own the change and take the credit, without a dependency on the facilitator forming.
A Change Management Dashboard per project
Each strategic change project got a board: stakeholders as rows (ordered by the factory’s real cascade), the eight change steps as columns, and a seven-colour status per cell — 56 possible states per stakeholder. Companion value tables converted those states into two running totals, Resistance and Opportunity, turning a vague «people aren’t on board» into a readable map of exactly where and how each project was stuck or moving.
Coaching tied to the basics
For every project the facilitator coached the leader and key stakeholders step by step — «be brilliant at the basics,» helping each person name the unique contribution only they could make. The working maxim: even with standardized procedures, if a person doesn’t feel they add something of their own, self-esteem, empowerment and performance fall and resistance rises.
A six-domain root-cause tool
When a block had no obvious cause, facilitators diagnosed across six domains — motivations, work environment, interests, systems/resources/competencies, programme objectives, and the implementation programme — and mapped the interactions between them to find which domain was the real root and which were merely circumstantial.
Press a few precise keys, not fifty action plans
Create real urgency
Rather than manufacture urgency, the team evaluated the pilot-line strategy, let the genuine risks surface, and used that evidence to create urgency in the steering committee — which gave a clear green light.
Build the guiding team
A change-agent enabling course was run, paired with team-building for the steering committee, so the coalition was both equipped and aligned.
Cascade vision & coach the line
Strategy was cascaded down the factory; dashboard-based coaching on the pilot line surfaced concrete signals of rising morale and proactivity — documented as the first evidence of movement.
The liberation strategy — the leap
Faced with dozens of open gaps, the team did not write a plan for each. The dashboard reveals the few cells whose release produces a drag effect — unblock the right one and adjacent, harder cells resolve on the stakeholder’s own initiative. Pressing those few precise keys unlocked a complex resistance situation at once. This is the JUMP UP / «Salto Organizacional» effect — and it is the effect that gives the methodology its name.
JUMP UP workshops for structural blocks
Where a block simply sat there with no cause, experiential role-play put stakeholders in a situation needing the very capabilities required back on the line. A reflection phase followed — an action plan filtered live against the JUMP UP criteria, so the actions chosen were joinable, unique, immediately movable and precise, and only fully visible under the new perspective the exercise created.
Root cause & guardrails
As more cells turned green on their own, attention moved to the last structural blocks via the six-domain tool — while guarding against the known failure modes: the vaccination effect, the change-management trap, and the middle-management sandwich.
Anchor it in the culture
The engagement closed by transferring the capability — methodology, guide and trained facilitators — into the plant itself (see Deliverables below).
Embed — Plan de Mejora (Plan_de_mejora.png): the improvement Gantt, as honest evidence the work was scheduled and run, not just described.
Tracked with Nestlé’s own instruments, not self-report
Leadership Development — 14-criteria assessment (pilot factory)
Steepest movers were exactly the behaviours a stalled plant lacks: Coach 0.2→0.9, Empower & Enable 0.4→0.9, Give & Receive Recognition 0.5→1.0, Reward Performance 0.3→0.8.
Employee engagement — Nestlé y Yo (pilot coffee factory, N=582)
Statistically significant gains versus the plant’s own history; several categories also above the external national benchmark (90,000+ employees).
Alongside the figures: competency matrix 64% → 71%, the NCE Gate Assessment passed, and the change-management process written up and accepted inside Nestlé as a replicable Good Practice under the Leadership Development pillar. Operationally, the stuck initiatives moved, TPM work returned to plan, and production stabilized.
The compliance audits it had been failing, passed cleanly
The real test came after the engagement. The plant had been failing internal compliance audits for a long time — a deep-seated production issue, not merely a matter of quality or equipment.
In the period that followed, those audits were passed cleanly. The result was significant enough that Nestlé reached out to recognize the work directly — privately, and then publicly via LinkedIn. For an intervention whose explicit goal was to leave the plant able to sustain change on its own, an outcome that held and improved after the facilitators stepped back is the proof that matters most.
Success was defined as the plant owning the change without us — and the clearest sign of it arrived after we had gone.
Not advice — a capability, transferred and kept
The engagement left tangible, owned assets inside the plant, so it could keep running its own change projects after the facilitators stepped back.
The complete methodology
A plant-specific change-management methodology, fully integrated into NCE — dashboards, value tables, the liberation strategy, the six-domain root-cause tool and the JUMP UP workshop design — codified for the client’s own use.
The Change Facilitators’ Guide
The formal reference procedure (internal code SER-MAN-57) documenting every phase end to end, so facilitation could be carried out consistently and audited against a checklist.
Training of the Change Facilitators
A full enablement programme that trained an internal body of Change Facilitators — including line coordinators — turning the methodology from a document into a living, in-house competency.
Not a cape-and-tights story
Zero added burden
The work rode the plant’s existing NCE routines — daily operational reviews, shift-owner meetings, the OMP — instead of bolting on a parallel programme. It reused what the company already had.
Measured, not asserted
Every headline number comes from Nestlé’s own assessments and a survey benchmarked against an external national norm of 90,000+ employees.
It left the client stronger, then left
Success was defined as the plant owning the change without the facilitator — and the post-engagement compliance result is the evidence it worked.
This engagement is also where the JUMP UP / Salto Organizacional method was fully integrated and codified into a formal procedure. But the methodology is the engine, not the story. The story is the client’s: concrete activities at a real plant, a stalled transformation turned into measured movement, audits passed, and the capability to keep going left behind.
This engagement, its results and the methodology it codified are held within the JubAp ecosystem and stewarded by The Integral Management Society / IMSV.org.
Explore more Case StudiesIndividual names, internal problem specifics and proprietary facilitator designs are withheld. Figures are drawn from the project’s 2014 records and Nestlé’s own assessment instruments.