Providing Insights to Manufacturing Leaders
Small and mid-size manufacturers will have times that they need specific expertise or additional bandwidth to tackle certain challenges. My consulting practice focuses on three areas:
It's easy to say "The price is set by the market", but putting that axiom into practice can be quite difficult. I help organizations look past traditional profitability metrics, like gross-margin, to understand product costs and profitability by product and customer so that a profit-driving pricing policy can be implemented.
Sometimes the gears of operations seem to get tangled up, resulting in poor customer service, increased costs, and high frustration levels with the team.
I help operations leadership teams to find the underlying cause of the issues and implement corrective actions. The solution is often more straightforward than it appears.
Companies need a strategy - the 3-5 year picture of where they are going. The creation of a strategy is one of the rare times for leaders to lift themselves out of being deep in the weeds of the business to look at the big picture.
I help organizations create a strategic plan that is straightforward, grounded, practical, and implementable.
The Consulting Process
In Step 1, we'll work together to get crystal clear about what we're trying to accomplish and what success looks like. This creates alignment about the approach and work plan, and it ensures that we're all on the same page about our roles and responsibilities.
Taking the time to get this step right sets the foundation for a successful outcome.
Most consulting engagements have an analytic phase. It may involve data mining, observations, and interviews. In Step 2, we'll gather the data and synthesize it until we get clarity and insight that can steer the engagement.
The reporting of findings will be anti-climatic because we'll be communicating throughout the engagement.
The most important part of this phase is the creation of the roadmap for moving forward.