Point Solutions Are Not Enough. Raise your Expectations.
Are you searching for operations consulting firms? An experienced and effective operations consultant should help your company meet its operational goals much faster and more fully than it would without support. If you have been working with an operations consultant or an operations consulting firm for a year or more, and you’re not seeing measurable financial gains—or if progress is too slow—it’s time to re-evaluate your relationship.
Here’s What You Should Expect From Your Operations Consulting Firm:
- Strategic Flexibility. Reduced floorspace requirements and the ability to quickly switch production lines and work cells from one product to another are only the beginning. The additional space and enhanced flexibility needs to support the company’s growth strategy and deliver clear financial benefits.
- Faster responsiveness. In any market a company’s ability to fulfill orders tells customers how much you want their current and future business. Not only should your operations consultant be helping you shorten order lead times, they should be making it easier for the company as a whole to respond to shifts in market demand and changing customer requirements.
- Non-stop cost reductions. Cost reductions are a core focus of almost every operations consulting engagement. However, one-off labor and material cost-reductions are not enough to maintain margins over the long run. Navigating price pressures and market fluctuations requires steady cost reductions long after the “low-hanging fruit” has been realized.
- Shorter times to market. A holistic operational improvement program will include your engineering and new product development processes. Your operations consultant should be helping to accelerate your new product development cycle from concept to cash.
- Leadership practices that will sustain your gains. An effective operations consultant will help implement a disciplined process for daily management that addresses day-to-day issues, maintains previous process improvements and supports the execution of strategic priorities.
- Alignment between your improvement priorities and your business strategy. A deployment process will drive strategic priorities down to all levels and functional areas of your organization. An experienced operations consulting team will align targets, improvement initiatives, and management responsibilities to deliver the anticipated returns.
Those are six areas where your operations consulting team should be having a clear impact on your company’s operational performance. Everything that goes into accomplishing that is the subject for another blog post. But it starts with people who are comfortable working side-by-side with your employees on the floor at the point of impact where value is created. Are your consulting partners willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in to help your organization achieve its business objectives?
As noted above, making progress in each of these areas and sustaining your gains requires daily management discipline and top-to-bottom alignment around strategic goals.
New eBook Explores Best Practices for Sustaining Operational Excellence
To help executives better understand the pitfalls and potential, TBM thought leaders recently wrote and published an eBook: Sustaining Your Operations Powerhouse. Download your copy today.
