Proposed and billed on a per-project and per-milestone basis, project consulting offers our clients a way to harness our specific qualities and use our expertise to solve specific problems, develop, implement plans or address a specific opportunity.
Operational Improvement On-time, On-Quality, On-Cost
The only three fundamentals in operational excellence are to deliver what the customer wants
(On-Quality), when they want it (On-Time) at a cost that yields you a profit (On-Cost). It's easy to
improve any one of the three to the detriment of the other two. For example, many programs start
with the objective to reduce cost but while they achieve this short-term objective, delivery and
quality performance suffers - in other words the initiative has failed to achieve a net gain. Game
Change ensures net gain - meaning that improvements in any of the three do not harm any of the
others.
Research and our experience point to a number of critical elements in
delivering effective, sustainable improvements in operational performance:
Decide the priority of each of the three fundamental aims (Time, Quality, Cost), then set clear
quantifiable objectives and measure a baseline for each objective. Determining the baseline early on
is critical to being able to prove the benefits of your intervention later.
There are appropriate tools depending on your primary business objectives, so select the right
toolset. Generally, tools of Lean are more effective in improving the on-time fundamental, whereas
Six-Sigma tools better for improving quality. A message here is to avoid overloading your people
with a myriad of tools that they won't use, or will use ineffectively.
Every improvement project must capture the views of disparate parts of the business. Generally,
businesses are complex organisations meaning that no single person, department or
function has a complete understanding of any cross-functional process. An end-to-end view is critical
to ensuring effective change otherwise a change will almost certainly create problems in other parts
of the business.
For sustainable change to happen, the people who must change their actions and behaviours
must design the solution together. A core principle of implementing changes is to enable the 'actors'
to influence the outcomes. Failure to do this will result in any changes being thrown out at a later
stage as the organisation reverts to its previous state.
Typical initiatives where Game Change can help you realise effective and sustainable
improvements:
Case Study: Operational Improvement On-time, On-Quality, On-Cost
Improvement and Change Programs
Improvement and Change Programs all too often fail to deliver.
Most organisations' histories are littered with ineffective improvement programs such as TQM, BPR,
Quality Circles and the like.
The launch of a new one results in the BOHICA reaction: "Bend Over, Here It Comes Again". Also
known as Initiative Fatigue, this response makes deploying a really effective program very difficult.
And the troubles don't stop there; maintaining a program's momentum in the face of ever-changing
business priorities is a mine-field.
The best programs are ones that are built from the inside of the business, rather than simply
picking up a 'branded' program from another organisation.
Game Change consultants have supported and driven many change programs across a wide variety of industries and business dynamics. We know how to navigate your program through the cultural and political environments to
ensure success. Just some of the elements every program needs to consider:
Cultural diagnostics
Change readiness determination
Program marketing and publicity strategy
Results reporting systems
We provide expert advice and implementation for programs such as:
Corporate Transformation/Improvement intiatives
Compliance Management
Innovation Management
Lean Six Sigma Deployment
Lean Engineering and Product Development
Lean Manufacturing
Case Study: Re-invigorate a Key Business Initiative
Supply Chain Excellence
Globalization has affected today's supply chains with a variety of
pressures, such as significant changes in commodity availability and prices, compressed time
schedules, big swings in currencies, global competition, the need to align to emerging markets and
increasing product complexity.
In order to be better positioned to develop, source, manufacture and maintain superior
products and to deliver cost, service and cash flow improvement, the negative bottom-line impact of
more traditional supply chain models cannot be ignored.
Our specific expertise allows us to understand the unique supply chain dynamics and the value chain that exists.
Challenges
Increased transportation costs to maintain inventory schedules.
Effectively pinpoint product activity in the supply chain, and to react quickly to supply
disruptions.
A greater number of partners requiring a mechanism to collaborate with in building a product.
Fewer amounts of safety stock requiring coordinated delivery accuracy.
Added complexity to the supply chain structure to support lean manufacturing objectives.
Synchronization of transportation and production schedules.
React to changes at the plant, supplier, or program level to assess the impact on the logistics
network.
Fixing these problems is challenging and requires new ways of looking at supply chain improvement.
We provide the right blend of fact, rigour and practical application to improve the way your company manages its resources and assets. We support typical Supply Chain related
business scenarios and projects, such as:
Supply Chain Cost Reduction
Supply Chain Transformation
Supplier Capability Assessments and improvement programmes
Logistics and fulfilment
Order planning and forecasting
Asset management
Green and Lean operations
Supply Chain visibility and control
Supply Chain Risk and Complexity Management
Developing a culture of continuous improvement
Progressive synchronisation of extended supply chain activities.
IT Business Transformation
IT is a key driver for organisational and business process improvement. Adapting not
only systems and workflows, but also organisational structures and the way people work is critical
for the success of many IT projects. In many cases, a simultaneously initiated cultural change is the
key to sustainable business improvements via IT.
We work with your teams to unlock the cashable benefits of integrated systems and processes.
Our approach is based on prioritising and implementing changes based on proven methodologies
and tools for embedding process improvement to help get the most from an ERP investment.
Through a rapid diagnostic, we evaluate whether your company can extract further value from your
ERP investment. We identify key areas of missed opportunities, identify targeted quick wins to
implement, quantify the benefits to be realised and qualify the rationale for your investment spend.
Very often our clients are aware that their ERP investment is not paying off and despite
attempts to fix process inefficiencies, address sub-optimal people performance or correct data, they
often find another problem popping up elsewhere. The fire-fighting becomes expensive, which is
why our approach in the assessment phase is not to fix the symptoms, but rather to determine the
root causes and their relationships to each other, so once we implement a programme of IT Business
Transformation, we ensure the sequence of change activity permanently eradicates the problems.
We provide the strategy, tools and practical "know how" required to deal with the challenges of
IT Business Transformation to unlock the cashable benefits of integrated systems and processes.
We support typical IT-related business scenarios and projects, such as:
ERP Business Optimisation
Procurement (BPO)
Shared Services
ERP Implementation & Turnaround
Management Reporting
Data Integrity
Business Process Transformation
Revenue Growth
We often find that our clients usually have great positions in very good industries, wonderful technologies to differentiate and add value for customers, and a strong balance sheet. The only missing element is the drive and focus to implement a growth process that proactively and efficiently generates, selects and develops growth ideas.
This begins not inside the business but outside it, focused on answering the questions, How can we make the customer more competitive? and What is critical to the customers success?.
The link
between sales and operations is vital in helping to identify volatile customer requirements and
understanding how requirement changes impact quality, costs and schedules. In general,
requirements volatility is one of the two most significant risks to achieving prifitable growth. It
undermines the ability to manage functional scope, cost, delivery to schedule, and product or service
quality (the other is inaccurate estimation).
It has been demonstrated many times that while not easy to do, locking in solid customer-based
requirements early will reduce unnecessary rework loops later in the process. One of the advantages of
implementing proven six sigma tools such as Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is to clarify the
customer requirements during the "plan the offer" phase and collect them in one place, so that
on-going design changes are minimized both during development and after product release. We cover
topics like these by focusing on early identification of requirements that are likely to change over
time and the impacts of those potential changes.
Our consultants and trainers incorporate market research, industry expertise and perspectives
with proven methodologies to help clients manage risk and achieve their profitability and growth
objectives.
Design for X: DFSS, DFM, DFA, etc
Improve Customer requirements capture and analysis
Enhance Customer satisfaction
Improve Costing/Pricing
Innovation (New Product Introduction)
Prioritise Investment in R&T
Turnaround/Post-merger-integration
After all the work put into preparations for an acquisition or merger it seems intuitively strange that 70%
of deals fail to deliver the expected benefits to either party. Research points to a failure to follow through with
the plans and a lack of attention to detail post-deal as the major reasons.
Game Change consultants' experiences demonstrate that specific attention needs to be given to
identifying the interfaces between the parties and to the processes on both sides of those interfaces in the
pre- and immediate post-deal phases. This must then be followed up with people-inclusive deployment to
release the synergies. Momentum created during the pre-deal phase must be maintained throughout the
following periods.
Turnaround situations follow similar phases but are often simpler because they do not involve the
introduction of critical interfaces with another party. Nonetheless, the same principles apply: careful
identification of opportunities for improvement, waste, duplication and complexity followed by people-inclusive
deployment of new processes to realise the benefits.
We are specialists in operational performance, working alongside your financial experts and strategists to
create a comprehensively skilled team.
Typical elements comprising a Game Change assignment in these fields include:
Identification of operational gaps, overlaps, duplications, wastes and the potential synergies.
Assessing and prioritising the impact of any potential gains on the cultural and political environment.
Facilitating your people to work through the process changes required
Planning and preparing for changes to processes including necessary IT/IS issues
Monitoring benefits realisation
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