Auditing workflows in your organization using CI tools such as Kaizen, a lean tool that promotes continuous improvement in quality, technology, processes, productivity, company culture, and safety. A key component of our lean process is interviewing teams to determine the actual ways of working as opposed to what their policies and procedures spell out.

Benchmarking against best practices and proposing improvements that include different levels of Industry 4.0 adjustments gives your business a competitive edge. These modifications could include fine-tuning the running of API workflows so data syncs across systems; improving processes through robotics automation; and building machine learning tools that look for data patterns and continuously offer recommendations for improvement.

The last thing a business needs is a strategic plan that leads it down a path no longer relevant, especially in the face of modern industry and the emerging sources of value creation. Corporate strategies come and go, sometimes in the blink of an eye.  That truism has never been more evident in the extensive disruption brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also witnessed in disruptive technologies such as AI, robotics and IoT.  Every corporate strategic plan should be nimble enough to search for and absorb new information on relevant technologies and continuously improve operations to stay ahead of competition and meet market needs.

Once our proposals are adopted, we create individual change projects that are designed and timed to move the organization from its current state to its proposed state. In our experience, this requires the alignment of corporate strategy at the business unit and functional levels.

Business level improvements support your organization’s corporate strategic plan as well as each business unit’s strategic plan. If your corporate and business unit level plans are to grow and meet the needs of your markets while your operational plans remain static, it’s unlikely that your organization is going to achieve its objectives.

Functional improvements in organizational shared services and departments receive improvements that directly support their work processes. When any area of business receives strategic or operational updates, the supporting functions must be one of the first areas of the organization to be informed. Operational excellence in functions such as finance, purchasing, inventory, payroll, HR, and IT are often necessary to accelerate critical pathways.

IMPROVEMENT AS A STRATEGIC FUNCTION

We facilitate these adjustments by attaching CI plans to your strategic planning processes and doing the nitty-gritty work essential to carrying your corporate strategy forward. While many strategic planning engagements are often smaller in scope and center on one aspect of strategy, the CI process bores into all levels of the organization to identify the factors that help or hinder the organization’s ability to make improvements.

At the Corporate Strategy Level, our CI processes ensure that divisions and brands can support the operational aspects of the corporate strategy by first assessing competitive and market environments. An example of this is our involvement was to confirm their ability to speed to market with its new EV line of vehicles. Our first step was to ensure each launch-point country assess their logistics to ensure they could support a rapid market entry. In a step-by-step manner, our CI process moved them from their ‘today’ to their ‘future’ structure.

Business Unit-Level Strategy involves working with divisions to reach a point of self-diagnosis and improvement. As example, too many vendors initiating marketing projects with manufacturers can force business units to add more time and cost in support of each venture. Our approach is having your workflow structures planned out to ensure project execution with speed and efficiency. Vendors need to align with the company’s planned workflow and managers given dashboards and KPI’s to know when activities are exceeding budget or time parameters.

Functional Level Strategy becomes more technical as CI begins to require more detail work than that applied to other strategy levels. Functional strategy involves workflow improvements in departments that are shared resources at headquarters and across all business units. Those functional areas would include such areas as finance, purchasing, inventory, payroll, HR, and IT.