Group50 sponsored this webinar which focuses on Recession Planning and Fine Tuning a company’s business plan in turbulent times. Subject matter experts in Finance, Leadership and Operations discussed best practices and the Do’s and Don’ts they learned during their corporate and consulting careers and multiple economic cycles with hundreds of companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies such as GE, Black & Decker, Deloitte, Underwriters Laboratories and (more…)

The most successful way to look at unneeded business processes and their costs to the business is through a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) project. VSM provides a clear view of how various business processes are related to each other and assesses the need for those processes and how efficient they really are.

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• Reduce working capital by approximately $15M
• Lower yearly costs by nearly $2.5M
• Reduce lead times from forecast to delivery to 70-110 days putting them in the top quartile of their customer’s vendors.

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Most organizations do Leadership Succession Planning at some level of effectiveness. Very little has been written about the need for incorporating technology succession planning and while technology leadership is part of the standard succession planning model, little is done about succession planning and skills development for subject matter experts, their supporting teams and successive upgrades and new technologies. Teams (more…)

In Part V of the series on Driving Continuous Improvement, we discuss the importance of utilizing the right combination of continuous improvement tools and data. This is where the rubber meets the road. Once you have your program aligned with your business strategy and (more…)

Many people believe that continuous improvement is a culture.  It certainly is in the eyes of the Japanese and many others, but is continuous improvement really a culture or something else? (more…)

This case study describes how a healthcare consulting team of process improvement experts, utilizing Lean Techniques, were able to help a home healthcare provider improve annual profitability by $900K, reduce overtime by 50%, increase productivity by 10% and increase revenue by 3%. (more…)

After Action Review, Post Mortem, Critique… all are terms used to describe an assessment of a project, event or activity after said project is completed.  Our experience is that the After Action Review process is an important continuous improvement tool especially for major transformative activities such as the implementation of new digital technologies (software systems, user tools, etc.), (more…)

Continuous improvement has a long history in the business world and after over 50 years, many leadership teams we talk to believe that it can be done quickly and implemented throughout the organization in 6-12 months.  How wrong they are. This article is about not overdoing continuous improvement at the outset.

It is important to understand the base you are operating from. Most organizations (more…)

In the introduction, I identified 5 things you need to do to drive continuous improvement.  They are:

1. Align continuous improvement with strategic objectives
2. Don’t overdo process excellence at outset; this is an evolutionary process
3. Integrate continuous improvement into a culture of strategic execution
4. Blend the best practices from the different methodologies
5. Focus on data, not emotions

In this article, we show how business strategy should drive continuous improvement programs and not the other way around. Continuous improvement (more…)