Business Process Improvement & Product Development

Great improvements inside your plant’s four walls are a good first step. Eventually though, everyone asks the same questions: Is my customer getting better products and service, faster? Are improvements in the office keeping pace with improvements on the plant floor? Have our core business processes kept pace with investments in IT and ERP? The answer is usually no, not until LeanSigma work expands into the front office, where teams can slash product development cycle time, eliminate costly delays in order processing and vastly improve customer service.

Moving LeanSigma to the front office is not easy. It is notoriously difficult to clearly see and then improve core processes. But this work is critical for a company’s overall transformation, as business managers and engineers alike learn to manage by performance measurements instead of by gut feel.

That’s why we focus on non-manufacturing areas, to:

• Control costs associated with wasted time and repetition
• Accelerate new product development
• Improve order-to-cash cycles
• Eliminating unnecessary work to increase capacity without new cost
• Free high-cost, high-value people to work on critical improvement projects
• Align the front office with manufacturing in lean thinking
• Improve those “fixed” SG&A costs to keep pace with market realities

We help you decide where to work and why, while you develop your internal capabilities. For one company’s journey, click here.

TBM can help with:

• Driving lasting fundamental change in core business philosophies
• Assist IT departments in improving responsiveness and effectiveness
• Accelerating new product design and new production start-up cycles

 

“To the unknowing eye, many business processes seem almost invisible. A finger hits a key to input an order but what happens next. With a LeanSigma approach, we can quickly evaluate and improve the entire process.”
Jeff Ruiter,
Director of Demand Management Distribution,
BP Service Delivery US: EDS