The ten key profit drivers
When we look at organizations to assess opportunity, we focus on ten key profit drivers.
Internal Teams
Are suggestion boxes useful?
Suggestion boxes are one of those seemingly good ideas that can easily backfire. When we are studying a process area we create a big wall map which is a visual presentation of how the process works. It makes it easy for employees to see how and where their part of the process fits into the whole.
Managing vertical functions in a horizontal process
Due to the functional nature of most organizations, workload can become quite easily unbalanced when you look at it from the perspective of a horizontal process.
In search of world-class performance
World-class, or best-in-class, are terms that organizations like to use to either describe themselves or to use as ...
Don’t draw your findings from your conclusions
In the last Opportunity we discussed the value of being a contrarian, so it seems only appropriate that now we'll ...
The unlikable tendencies of a consultant
Contrarians have an innate desire to be skeptical, take opposing viewpoints, and want to do things differently. Although it can be slightly irritating for others in a social setting, it's very helpful when you are looking for opportunities in a business.
A solution in search of a problem
A consultant spent three hours watching a production line trying to find opportunity. It was a simple quality inspection area where the product flowed in a continuous stream past a number of trained inspectors.
Managers don’t provide a “backup” assignment
In many operations, back up assignments can be a useful means to even out daily workflow. By providing a "ready backlog" of work that can be pulled if the main task is delayed for whatever reason, a manager can help optimize the productivity of an area.
Managers assign work unevenly
Uneven work assignment is a management problem, not a worker problem. Management's job is to try to elevate the overall group productivity.
Managers assign work without time parameters
We were working for a large software development company. One of the big operating concerns was the timely ...
When managers don’t assign work
A lot of productivity is lost due to how work is assigned, or in this case, when it's not assigned. What we often see is that the manager plays the role of a work collator, someone who creates a backlog of tasks that an employee can draw from. Work is "loaded" as opposed to "assigned."
The surprising importance of SMART work assignments
We spend a lot of time during our diagnostic phase doing "day-in-the-life" studies. The purpose of these studies is not to watch an individual, it's to watch the process flow and transfer points at what we call "the point of execution."
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