Company operated two design and production facilities on opposite ends of country making colorants for plastics. Variation in product quality was regular complaint from customers. Owner/President wanted to significantly improve performance of company, create culture of performance excellence, and position company for rapid growth. Difference in cultures and age of plants between East Tennessee and Los Angeles proved difficult obstacles to overcome.

Developed an understanding of culture that President wanted to create, participated in corporate strategic planning retreats, and coached President through first 18 months of process. Planned and led reengineering project. Trained all managers and senior professionals from across country in effective management principals and ISO 9004 management systems. Identified processes that were missing and essential to performance excellence. Created high-level process map of management system and used expertise of people working throughout company to refine and integrate every process. Led technical evaluation of production operations to identify and correct causes for product nonconformance, late shipments, variation, and rework. Provided technical expertise in development of processes and quality controls, online documentation and data systems, and product standardization.

Increased sales by 70% to more than $100M. EBIT dollars per employee grew more than 40%. New management systems became standard and were easily integrated into future acquisitions.

Owners were approaching retirement and wanted business to be sustainable without involvement. Company had 350 employees at two facilities and used documented management system that was out-of-date with multiple overlapping and conflicting procedures on most processes. Several vice presidents were extremely protective of turfs and were positioning for advancement with owner’s retirement.

Planned reengineering project. Formed, trained, and led cross-functional/cross-facility team in effective management principals, business process reengineering, ISO 9001 management systems, and project management. Created high-level process map of management system and used expertise of personnel in each area to refine every process, reducing waste and improving output quality. Led technical evaluation of production operations to identify and correct causes for product nonconformance, late shipments, variation, scrap, and poor productivity. Coached and mentored key managers and professionals within team to ensure rapid increase in systems thinking and quality management understanding, and that there would be personnel in all areas of company to continue push for performance excellence after departure. Counseled Owner/President in overcoming resistance from two vice presidents.

Recouped the $1.5M spent on business restructuring project and owners retired within 18 months. Within six years company was sold for more than eight times previous value.

Georgia Quality Award process relies on volunteers to perform assessments. Three-year learning cycle and volunteers leaving before becoming proficient were severely hindering organization’s ability to expand understanding of performance excellence within state and assess potential award winners. Became difficult to recruit volunteers who were successful business leaders, professionals, and consultants who would agree on one approach. Numerous volunteers competed for dominant roles in organization.

Volunteered to be back-up team leader. Developed, refined, and demonstrated tools for managing large-scale assessment and for training new team members in thought processes and techniques. Through individual and group coaching, project management, and leadership by example, ensured that each volunteer was enthralled by amount of learning and that team was most successful in history of organization. Established credibility by volunteering to create and revise policy and training manuals, fill role of Process and Customer Advocate, manage teams at last moment, and develop new product for organization. Refined tools and approaches and created training materials to enhance rate and depth of learning. Shared these during leadership and new assessor trainings and applied them with next team. Repeated this process.

Learning cycle time for assessors reduced to one year, fewer volunteers needed at start of every cycle, and increased understanding of Criteria for Performance Excellence within Georgia business community led to increased earnings per share, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Department was formed from diverse group of under-productive and highly experienced personnel working in areas of project management, process engineering, safety/environmental management, auditing, and continuous improvement management. Improvement projects were consistently behind schedule and over budget and produced unsatisfactory results. Each person had been with company for 7 to 20 years. Most had high opinion of self while senior management of company had opposite opinion. Additionally, most department personnel had unique and essential knowledge within company and history of operating independently.

Established expectation that each member would improve own performance and together function as a team. Initiated process of individual productivity analysis and improvement. Instituted biannual 360-degree performance appraisals and professional development planning with personal objectives linked to company objectives, monthly reports summarizing accomplishments and plans for personal improvement, bi-monthly individual coaching, and immediate feedback from team members. Aggressively delegated responsibility, assigned responsibilities in other team members’ areas of expertise, demanded demonstrated learning from failure, required all activities be preceded by planning, and ensured that quantitative approaches were used to monitor performance and that all were aware of individual performance as well as team performance. Led by example and created standard for performance excellence by doing a more thorough job on everything demanded of team members.

Average weekly productive time increased from less than 20 hours to more than 40 hours, which led to two people being reallocated to production improvements, elimination of two positions, 50% reduction of reportable injuries, sale of all scrap raw materials with 30% reduction in landfill, 230% improvement in warranty, upgrading to TS16949 certification.

Company had survived eight years of annual product-price reductions forced by customers and increases in purchased material prices, situation that had driven several competitors into bankruptcy. Parent corporation was losing money and company management was in reactive mode with little or no focus, further impacting ability to reduce costs and increase new product sales. Company was understaffed due to continuous demands from corporate for justification of staffing levels and personnel assignments, and reductions in indirect workforce even though indirect staffing levels were less than half of corporate levels.

Enhanced performance measurement system so that all personnel in company were aware of performance of own and other’s processes. Facilitated Leadership Team to ensure that all members participated, understood expectations, were aware of individual and team performance, and coached Division VP into becoming team leader. Led strategic planning and deployment process, and ensured constancy of purpose and performance in Leadership Team. Set standard within senior management team for leadership, effective management, and professionalism. Managed group of people responsible for leading continuous improvement effort within company and designed many new management approaches for company.

In first year, company became most profitable in corporation, generated cash savings from improvements of more than $523K, reduced reportable injuries more than 50%, and improved production-labor efficiencies while number of people available to work on improvement was reduced.

Politically connected subcontractor wanted company’s $100M environmental cleanup contract. Subcontractor management was exploiting every problem they could find and some employees were subtly sabotaging project. Sabotage most likely to cause contract termination was related to validity of environmental testing results. Became difficult to maintain working relationship with personnel needed to fulfill contract and management during project sabotage attempts.

Took initiative to usurp authority of subcontractor and perform root/cause study on supposed failures. Compiled all instances of questionable lab results from previous two months. Formed and led team of technical and QA personnel from both companies and Department of Energy (customer) to review chain of evidence and evaluate laboratory’s processes and controls. Team included technical and supervisory personnel from subcontractor who had declared each test result invalid. Used team to prove that sampling and handling activities did not compromise validity of test results and that laboratory had performed duties correctly. Issued report through project manager to Department of Energy, bypassing subcontractor who was contractually responsible for validating results.

Saved contract and division of company. Department of Energy (customer) accepted that test results were valid and unofficially acknowledged that subcontractor had been actively engaged in sabotaging project.

Errors in billing and employee commissions were causing complaints every month from primary customers and service providers, costing company and customers several man days each per month to correct. In addition, manual approaches used for billing and commission calculation required minimum of seven man days per month and cost lost revenues due to under-billing. Every contract had unique terms and fee structures. PC illiteracy of service providers and office personnel added to existing confusions.

Created standard service agreement with baseline fee structure and arranged for all long-term contracts to be revised with service agreement at core. Standardized service and sales commission structure and negotiated new employment agreement with all service providers to implement changes. Developed software specification for contract and service management database that would also generate detailed invoices, polite dunning notices, and commissions. Reengineered service, sale, tracking, and reporting processes. Provided technical oversight during software design, testing, and implementation; and trained all personnel in use of software and new processes.

Significantly increased revenues by capturing all service charges and reduced office workload by at least 25%. Reduced accounts receivable timeline by five days by issuing invoices on first of the month. Eliminated billing and commission errors and associated customer and service provider complaints.

Founder of five-year-old business became incapacitated which contributed to monthly losses exceeding 40% of revenues. Clinical service providers were demanding increased salaries and reduced caseloads and wanted to charge patients less. Informal office and business management processes such as manual billing and accounting practices were exacerbating situation. Company loan authorization limit had been reached.

Hired experienced Office Manager and implemented participative management and focus on long-term organizational development. Installed PCs and instituted accounting program, refined/created and documented primary office and service processes, and implemented quality and stakeholder satisfaction checks in key business and clinical processes. Implemented radio advertising to attract individual private pay customers (much higher profit margin business). Worked with managers and administrators from institutional customers to understand and fulfill speech pathology needs. This included acquiring additional service providers. Expanded customer base by doing same for potential institutional customers within 50-mile radius. Developed monthly in-house training program for clinical service providers to ensure service providers were fully cross-trained and to minimize cost of maintaining credentials. Implemented 360-degree performance appraisals and professional development planning for all employees and contract service providers.

Doubled gross earnings, improved productivity of clinical and administrative personnel, restored profitable operations with favorable profit trend, and paid off all outstanding debt.

Automotive customer responsible for 60%+ of sales threatened to put company on “new business hold” list because of excessive warranty claims associated with parts. Possessed no personal knowledge of automotive warranty systems, and company had no experience in warranty reduction or budget for warranty reduction. Customer warranty-reduction personnel uncooperative and believed that product should be resourced. Customer and company data systems were severely flawed, making it difficult to link warranty claims to specific part numbers.

Studied warranty data systems, developed process and data system for capturing information on how and where parts were used, developed process for analyzing failed parts, claim data, and vehicle history. Increased perception of company’s value by becoming most active member of customer’s warranty-reduction team and helping engineers and warranty personnel to reduce warranty claims. Proved that vast majority of warranty claims allocated to company were due to errors made in assembly plants, parts made by other suppliers, or mechanic errors.

Warranty score increased from failing grade of 38 to perfect 100 in less than 11 months ensuring that company remained on preferred-supplier list.

One supplier’s nuclear fuel assemblies had unacceptable tendency to develop holes in tubing early in useful life of product. Tubing is number one barrier against release of radiation which means that every highly radioactive assembly had to be inspected during every refueling and all assemblies containing any failed tubes had to be taken out of service. Cost to company was more than $1M every year. Supplier had known of problem for many years and refused to consider changing production processes as requested or invest resources to develop alternative correction.

Coordinated and directed team of nuclear fuel production and performance experts in performing extensive evaluation of each production facility involved in nuclear fuel production process, and identified hundreds of technical and implementation issues. Requested that each issue be addressed by company. Directed fuel performance expert to build computer models based on information collected to identify probable failure causes. Convinced manager at one supplier facility to apply Artificial Intelligence tools at fuel production facility and gave fuel production managers politically acceptable solution of using new approach developed at sister plant.

Company saved more than $15M and prevented radioactive releases from fuel tubes. In addition, every utility purchasing nuclear fuel from this supplier has experienced similar savings.

CNFD fuel assemblies had highest failure rate among three suppliers costing company more than $1M each year. In addition, supplier had long history of being uncooperative and blocking customer efforts to investigate causes for product failures. CNFD senior management was purposefully uncooperative and overall management system consisted of two parallel, overlapping, contradicting, and complex subsystems with customers only having access to quality management system.

Built support with CNFD supervisors and managers in all facilities and functions by helping improve performance within own areas. Frequently this included introduction and refinement in Total Quality concepts and approaches. Became networking agent between different CNFD facilities to help managers solve problems using technologies developed at other facilities.

Performed correlation analysis on historic results from management system audits, manufacturing process surveillance, and design reviews to outline pattern of failure and point at root causes. Led team of five specialists to perform intensive evaluation of design, manufacturing, and management processes, frequently being given access to sensitive information without awareness of senior management. Provided affected CNFD management with data and conclusions and outline of changes needed in management systems and culture.

CNFD became first recipient of Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and eliminated predominant design and manufacturing causes for product failures.

International environmental management company creates new management system for every project and charges customer for that work. This was wasting professional resources and customer money (US government was biggest customer) and usually produced highly flawed management systems. Projects tended to be behind schedule and over budget. Corporate senior executives believed that approach, created when company was new, was beyond reproach.

Compiled recent performance information and linked failures to meet timelines and budget to time required to create QA Manuals for each project. Used information to convince two local Vice Presidents to provide senior personnel for reengineering project. Designed management system around company’s matrix management approach that included core processes the same on every project and family of process options for all other management and technical processes. Led team in creating documentation, training local employees and contractors, and piloting new management system on local projects.

Projects started under budget and ahead of schedule, which exceeded expectations of customers. Timeline for creation of Project QA Manual went from two-to-four weeks to two days, saving more than $50K per month.