




Understanding Your Needs and Our Approach
Back2Basics niche is serving manufacturing companies that recognize the need to "get back to the basics". These companies understand that they need to get control of fundamentals, such as streamlining flow, maintaining accurate inventory, meeting customer demand, and achieving cost and profit targets. Management's options include dictating "fixes" through brute force or applying sustainable solutions through application of Lean and BPM. Back2Basics helps management understand the important implications of that decision (short-term "fix" versus longer-term solution).
One of the challenges companies face is getting a grip on management of business processes. A holistic improvement approach not only improves the physical operations that are widget-related, but also improves the office/admin/backroom processes that are transactional and information related. Why? Because many times it is the office/admin/backroom functions that chew up precious leadtime and leave Operations "jumping through hoops".
Symptoms that indicate situations where Back2Basics services can have high impact include:
- Plant is in state of constant "fire fight".
- Product and process flow are unrecognizable.
- Performance metrics are deficient, drive inward-focused behavior, or have no relevance to "horizontally" serving the customer.
- Functions are operating in silos and pointing blame upstream and downstream.
- Management does not have confidence in plant's ability to produce on-time or on-budget.
- Plant is disorganized – leading to lost material, wild adjustments, and wasted motion and conveyance.
- Product launches are miserable experiences for all involved – especially the customer!
- Customers are threatening to pull demand and/or avoid quoting new business.
Using Lean, Six Sigma and Business Process Management (BPM) improvement concepts, methods, and techniques, Back2Basics assists clients to achieve sustainable results using the following general project structure:
- Define the business issues and scope of the project.
- Assess the needs, clarify the issues, and estimate the improvement potential.
- Define performance measures and gather data to specify the problem/opportunity.
- Develop countermeasures to constraints and problems.
- Design solutions.
- Educate and train management and impacted workforce.
- Implement solutions.
- Measure on-going performance to confirm sustainability.
- Look for opportunities to leverage the improvement learning across other processes.
There is obviously more to improvement than this short list and we recognize that no two projects are exactly the same due the unique nature of your people, processes, and business issues. However, this framework does provide structure to allow effective exploration and implementation of the solution set that works for your company.