ProcessOpt Solutions

Improvement Based Strategies

An improvement-based strategy provides insight into your organization’s health in an everchanging environment.  Improvement activities result in increased efficiencies, quality, and productivity while reducing waste, redundancy, and operational costs. It’s all about competitive advantage and profit maximization.  Successful companies assess their business and manufacturing processes to determine underperformance and develop improvement strategies aligned with company goals.  Defects, rework, and poor quality negatively impacts the bottom line.  Moreover, work redundancy and complexity increase errors and completion time.  Automation of a suboptimal process yields less than stellar results.

ProcessOpt Solutions focuses on helping organizations build an improvement strategy and a pipeline of projects aligned with their strategic goals.  Process performance optimization is achieved through listening to the voices of the process and internal/external customers.  Client collaboration ensures strategic alignment of a path forward and use of the right methods/tools for sustainable improvement.  Our passion to leave a legacy by training and mentoring your workforce in the tools and methodology used.  By working with your colleagues, solutions  can be fast adapted and replicated internally.

Elements for Success

1. Keep the End in Mind.  Ensure the correct key performance indicators are in place and strategically aligned with the organization’s goals.  This includes targets for operational efficiencies and cycle times for task completion.  Focus on projects that will improve performance or eliminate the sources of process variation that cause pain downstream.
   
2. Be realistic and truthful.  One of the biggest hurdles to improvement occurs as a result of the “quick fix” mentality.  Implementing a best guess solution usually yields little improvement.  The same occurs if a mandate is given to attain any given metric.  This will result in attaining that goal but the impact on improvement is minimal, or even detrimental.
   
3. Be a sponsor and advocate for your improvement projects.  Free up your high achievers to lead and facilitate improvement projects and allow them time to find breakthrough solutions. Celebrate the wins and provide recognition to the team.
   
4. Listen to the voice of the process and the process workers.  This includes the use of team based tools such as C&E Matrix and FMEA to determine the effect of process parameters on performance.  Also required is enough of the right data to graph and analyze when the process is performing at its best and worst.
   
5. Realize breakthrough improvement occurs from identifying a series of factors that result in waste and inefficiencies.  Variability detracts from process performance.  Removal of variation, including redundancy, is the key to successful improvement.
   
6. Implement project metrics, checks, and actions required to ensure all gains are held in the future.  These control plans are very important and should become part of daily work practices.

Additional Benefits

People: Cross functional and top-down collaboration, employee empowerment, Soft Skills (Leadership, teamwork, communication, facilitation, collaboration, problem solving, etc.).  Data analysis skills.

Organizational:  $$$$ to bottom line, stellar performance versus metric, strategic focus, systemic approach to project prioritization, robust decision making, more skilled/self-aware work force, reward and recognition, job satisfaction/enrichment.