Working with Manufacturing Consulting Services, Inc. FAQ

What?

 

What have you done for other companies?

See Real Results: Case Studies and Testimonials.

 

What are some quick and dirty diagnostic’s as to whether this will clearly and heavily impact my organization?

We use a few quick and dirty diagnostic questions to evaluate potential new client pain. The reason that these are “quick and dirty diagnostic” is that problems in these areas are extremely common. This is by no means an exhaustive list, however if you answer “Yes” to any of these, or certainly if you answer “Yes” to more than one of them, then there are some serious opportunities in your operation for these methods!

1) Communication between Sales and Production or Service Departments

– Do your Sales Department and Production/Service Departments communicate in a friendly manner?

– Does the salesman ever show up at the shipping dock or look at the final report or deliverable and say “That’s not what I ordered!”?

2) Communication between Sales and Product or Service Development

Every organization has a function that defines how they actually produce value for their end customers/clients/citizens etc. However, different organizations typically have industry or sector specific names for this product or service design function. Some call it engineering, some call it “the lab”, some call it Information Architect, some call it the “composer” or the “choreographer” or some other name (not all of them complementary).

Here are a couple of quick and dirty diagnostic questions for this area:

– Do your Sales Department and your Product/Service Development Departments communicate in a friendly manner?

– Does Sales simply sell whatever they want to, from what ever product line or service line they want to, whether it actually in fact exists at the time they sell it, in order to “get the sale” regardless of whether it actually helps the organization or not? 

– Does Sales regularly push a design through product or service design “Just this Once”? 

– Is there an “Option Tree”: organization-wide agreed upon product or service lines complete the agreement on which options go with which products or services?  Or does the answer to which options go with which product lines depend on which department head you ask?

Do you pride yourselves on lots of options (custom or semi-custom) to “get the sale… just this once” but your clientele (read that price-level) is “production” or “stock” or “entry level.”  If so, are you producing custom work for a stock price?

– Are there both Product/Service designs and implemented production processes to efficiently move a given job/order/sale from Order Entry all the way through your Operations to Collection?

3) Communication between Your Production and/or Service Department and Your Product or Service Design Department

– Do they communicate in a friendly manner… or at all? 

– Are there regular “pilgrimages” from Production to senior managers or Product/Service Development per job?

– Are there regularly lines outside particular manager’s or process/product designer’s or schedulers offices?

– Are there “workarounds” on either desktop computers or in toolboxes in your operations departments (read that, “invisible to Product or Service Design) to actually enable them to build “whatever comes down the pike”?  A symptom of this condition is that some “official changes” take days… or weeks… or months to reliably show up in finished product or service execution.

4) Lieutenants

– If your operation started out as a single founder or as 2 to 3 founders, and you hired exceedingly capable “lieutenants” to handle the things that kept dragging the founders away from what they were good at (frequently either Marketing/Sales or Product/Service inventing/creation), and thus you grew significantly in your capabilities of delivering value to your final customer’s, have your “lieutenants” begun dropping the proverbial ball?

– Are there things that these bright capable and driven lieutenants used to be able to handle but now, with the additional growth that their presence enabled, they cannot seem to keep everything running… all the plates spinning… all the time… reliably? A “Hummmmmm” answer to this one is VERY common across manufacturers, service entities and government entities. (You’re not the only one(s) to whom this happens!)

Again, if you answered “Yes” to at least one of the questions in these areas, and even more so if you answered “Yes” to more than one of the questions, then learning and applying the methods of continuous process improvement will pretty shortly, directly and positively impact your organization’s bottom line, business cycle survivability, and executive hassle levels.

 

What can I expect when entering into a consulting engagement with Manufacturing Consulting Services, Inc.?

Manufacturing Consulting Services, Inc. fulfills intensive companywide consulting engagements.  Our standard consulting entrance practice, following a Letter of Agreement, is to teach business owners how to map their processes, literally from concept to collection. There are two purposes for this entrance into a consulting engagement:

1) To find out if there is a real fit. This process will reveal where the client is having pain, how much pain there is, and whether or not we can solve it.

2) To identify the most effective places to begin working. We do this by mapping the entire high-level Concept-to-Collections process.

This consulting is highly custom per organization. While the entrance method into any given consulting engagement is the same, the outcomes are very much custom. Every organization is unique, and only those who are willing to show up, be open to change and actually improve their processes are going to reap the results. For information on the effect of this consulting with other clients please see the Real Results: Case Studies page and the testimonials page.