Finding opportunities in logistics
Logistics sometimes means different things to different companies, which we once made the mistake of pointing out at a trucking convention (see Lessons Learned # 2 – Don’t put down your audience).
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Finding opportunities in quality
Quality has gone through many evolutions over the last twenty years driven by the popularity of gurus like Juran, Deming, and to a lesser degree, Crosby. Different concepts have caught on like
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Finding opportunities in maintenance
As technology has advanced and organizations have become more and more reliant on smoothly running equipment, viewing maintenance as a critical function to support throughput, rather than as a cost center to
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Finding opportunities in production
In production, management’s task is to effectively schedule the multitude of component processes that run in series or in parallel. In operations that are process-oriented, management must schedule resources and output around
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Finding opportunities in procurement
Procurement is a function that has gained in prominence over the years and has become an increasingly important strategic link for many organizations. The general stages of purchasing sophistication are: 1. basic
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Finding opportunities in finance areas
If you look at some of the activities performed by finance personnel with a critical external eye, you can often find people doing things for reasons that may no longer be valid.
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Finding opportunities in engineering departments
There are a couple of typical questions we explore when we’re looking for opportunity in engineering departments. Read more to find out.
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Finding opportunities in sales areas
The main focus for performance improvement is to improve sales effectiveness and efficiency. In essence, can you sell more higher margin things at a lower total cost?
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Finding opportunity in marketing departments
The first functional area we will look at is marketing, which also happens to be one of the more difficult functions to assess. The reason marketing is tricky is because it is
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Ten key functional areas
Most of the opportunities we have examined in this series have dealt with financial line items or at least fairly specific concepts. In the next 10 segments we will look a little
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