Investigate- When we establish a relationship with you and begin a project, the first thing we do is investigate. This takes a willingness on your part uncover all aspects of the business, help us with procuring data and making your employees available for interviews and possibly a survey. Lean tools utilized may include process maps and value stream maps to establish a firm baseline of where you are at. Once everything is out on the table, that's when the fun begins!
Visualize- This is where we take all of the seemingly disparate data, comments and ideas and start to organize them into an affinity diagram. Brainstorming sessions take place and experiments are defined. Interrelationship diagrams are drafted and it starts to become a little clearer. Like we said...this is the fun part. Click Here to see our GRAPHIC RECORDING AND FACILITATION page
Improve- This is where the rubber meets the road. We work along side of you to hold experiments, try new processes and move things around to save you time, money and frustration. We have clearly defined the bottlenecks and performance metrics in the investigate stage, so we will be able to tell if we are winning or losing. Often times we will hold a kaizen event and bring in a cross functional team of the executives, the managers, the employees doing the work and even your customers.
Coach- This isn't a typical consulting firm that uses a boiler plate template and leaves you with a stack of ideas with no real implementation plan. Once we start to make real gains together, we will work on a transition plan for you to maintain what we have improved. Although we love working with you, nobody cares about your business more than you do, so we need to empower you to continue on this journey. Don't worry, we are only a phone call, email, text or visit away...you got this!
Assess- There is nothing worse than making an improvement, seeing the fruits of your labor and then watching it backslide as it falls back into the old habits. We work with you to develop toll gates and measures to alert you to backsliding early in the process, where corrective coaching and teaching can take place to get back on track. Keep an eye out for us, we may just drop by to see how it's going...
That's the whole process...the five steps are simple...but they aren't easy.