How We Work With You

There are four basic phases to how we work with you.

1. Needs Analysis

The first step in the process is to meet directly with your top executives. The purpose of these meetings is for us to better understand your organization's business priorities and for your executives to evaluate our capabilities, approach and methodology. We also provide references for the work we have carried out in the past. From our perspective, we want to understand how decisions of this nature are made by your organization so that we can plan and execute an analysis of the business that will not only be insightful for you, but will also lead to a project if it makes good business sense.

2. Opportunity Analysis

Assuming your top executives believe it makes sense to further explore if we can help your company, the next stage is for us to come in and conduct a 2-3 week comprehensive business analysis on-site. The intent of the analysis is to determine whether our methodology will provide tangible profit and service improvements to your operation, over and above what you are already doing. We are only able to provide a specific proposal for a project once we have had an opportunity to assess the operation first-hand, and tie that assessment to the critical drivers of profit and service.

3. Project Delivery

The delivery phase consists of working with your people to analyze the current state and identify recurrent operating problems and the resulting performance gaps. From this baseline we help develop new processes, management tools and methods that result in the desired improvement. We prototype these changes to test how effective they will be and then we physically work with your managers to get them installed and working. We work shoulder-to-shoulder with your people to iron-out the inevitable issues that occur when you change methods. Together we make alignments or revisions necessary and then lock in the new way of doing things. The key outputs from this phase are better methods, better tools and stronger and more effective managers.

4. Sustain Results

The sustainability phase can last from 6 months to 18 months depending on the extent of the changes and the stability of the work force. All changes need to be documented into procedures (ISO procedures work well for this if they already exist). This phase consciously recognizes that there is a natural tendency to want to revert back to how things used to work. Familiar patterns of behavior are difficult to change. It is only through compliance to the new way of doing things and confidence from the resulting success that the new behaviors will eventually become habits. Periodic reviews are done to make sure that changes stick and to ensure managers move from pure compliance, to understanding, to eventually full ownership of the changes.