As your company continues to meet and exceed customer expectations, those expectations will only rise even higher. By serving as a long-term partner for your organization, we come to understand how you interact every day with your customers. This special relationship is our defining characteristic and allows us to help our clients meet increasing customer demands relating to volume and speed.
Value Stream Mapping: We work with your team members to identify the flow of value (“value” as defined by YOUR customer) that it takes to produce the product or service on its journey to the end user. We focus on the process and assess all the inputs required to produce the intended outputs. Through a combined “Waste Walk”, we also identify some of the non-value adding activities that may slow down the process and incur additional costs that your customer neither desires to nor should have to pay for (more on that later!). We’ll work with you to remove those non-value added steps and get your product or service to your customer in less time!
Capacity Planning: Your customer has a heartbeat, and so does the market you operate in. We use analytical methods to not only understand current demands, but to model and forecast future customer demand to support and sustain your anticipated growth. We create a “play book” of various models that may be used for flexible staffing and sequencing based on changing demand signals. This helps ensure that your valuable resources are used as efficiently and effectively as possible while delivering enough of your product or service to your customers where they want it and when they want it.
Constraint Management: Every operation has a constraint or a bottleneck. Contrary to popular belief, not all constraints or bottlenecks are necessarily negative nor need to be remedied. However, they do need to be properly managed in order to assure that your operational capacity can consistently meet demand. We will work with you to systematically manage your operational constraints and develop plans to alleviate them when necessary. In the short term, we almost always find a way to get at least 10% more output by applying our experience and knowledge to the resources you already have.
Lead Time Reduction: Together with the Value Stream Mapping and Waste Walks, we assess the non-value added activities and find ways to remove these from your process. In addition, we assess the value-added activities and look for ways to maximize resource utilization and streamline processes to increase operational velocity, meaning faster delivery to your customers.