Presentations for your leadership team or professional organization

The Essential Advantage

This presentation provides an overview of organizational health and its four disciplines. Susan will focus specifically on the leadership aspects that result in transformative improvement while creating a workplace that works for all.

The Working Genius

Everyone has natural talents and gifts that can be used in all parts of life, with strong applicability to work. There are six types of genius, two of which come naturally to you, you are good at them and they give you energy and joy; these are your areas of Working Genius. This presentation will describe the six types, their relationship to work, benefits and fundamental ways that a team can be transformed by using The Six Types of Working Genius.

The 6 Essentials to Competitive Productivity and Profitability

Leaders of small to medium-sized manufacturing organizations are often confused by the alphabet soup of improvement methodologies and do not have the resources, staff and matrixed organization to invest in the latest improvement methodologies. They need the six essentials of competitive productivity and profitability. This presentation describes the six essentials and a 5-step approach to assess and implement the essentials to compete both today and tomorrow.

Reducing the FOG: Using A Strategic Assessment to Identify and Develop Strategies for Quality

Small manufacturing organizations often struggle to identify and develop strategies for quality that guide and sustain the organization, especially when the organization suffers from Frequent changes, Organizational dysfunction, Gross waste and variation and has little technical competency in quality (FOG). This presentation shares a strategic assessment using the MBNQA Criteria, ISO 9004 and the Lean Six Sigma DMAIC structure that can be used to understand the current state of quality in an organization and identify strategies to implement the essentials to reduce the FOG to deliver revenue, improve growth and prepare the organization for the future through quality.

Team-based Variability Reduction

This presentation will engage participants in a case study of how one company used a team-based variability reduction methodology to enable operations teams to identify and eliminate sources of variability, establish the daily disciplines necessary to sustain the productivity improvements over time, and create an environment to facilitate step-change productivity improvement through Six Sigma.

Strategic Planning Deadly Sins

Strategic planning is critical for an organization to address its strategic challenges while leveraging its strategic advantages. Many organizations, however, fail to get the results they expect from their strategic planning efforts. The root cause may often be found in one or more “deadly sins” of strategic planning. This presentation will identify the common “deadly sins” of strategic planning and engage participants in identifying ways to prevent these “deadly sins” in their organizations.

Results

SOS has worked with a variety of manufactures from different industries to create and execute innovative solutions that achieve long-term results. Several examples are included below:

Manufacturer of automotive performance enhancing and maintenance products. The blending and packaging operations were plagued by quality events resulting in scrap, rework, missed schedules, low productivity and high cost. Firefighting and conflict led to inefficient use of resources and diminished plant capacity. SOS performed a strategic assessment of the organization’s quality system. While the organization had a dedicated and loyal workforce, vision, strategy, quality expectations and roles were not aligned. Twelve opportunities for improvement were identified, prioritized, and sequenced in three time frames. SOS then facilitated the execution of the immediate opportunities using learning cycles of Learn-Plan-Commit-Do-Report-Reflect with a small task team. The work resulted in the organization receiving multiple ISO registrations and facilitated the smooth start-up of a new blending facility.

North American communications provider. The print businesses embarked on an effort to improve cash flows by re-engineering and automating its business planning, financial and customer service operations with the goal to standardize these business processes across different print platforms and customers prior to installation of a new ERP system, Working with a team of business process personnel, SOS developed and documented a a common roadmap and tool kit to understand, streamline, map and standardize each process, train peers on the standard process, and run pilots manually before launch of the new system. Launch of the new ERP system proceeded smoothly with no interruption in daily operations or need for additional resources. 

Global food and beverage manufacturer. Experiencing waste, long cycle times, low productivity and high costs throughout its manufacturing operations, the organization chose to implement Six Sigma for breakthrough improvements. SOS co-led the development and delivery of Green Belt training, coaching 75 Green Belts to certification for over $2 million in savings.

North American communications provider. The print businesses sought an approach to embed continuous improvement into daily work practices in a way that created standard work and took advantage of real-time process performance data. Working closely with a corporate task team, SOS helped create a process variability reduction (PVR) methodology that standardized print and binding operations and removed sources of variation within the control of the operational work teams. The methodology created a foundation for Six Sigma breakthrough projects. Over the course of four years the print operations saw 4-10% sustained increase in throughput, an average $57k/year/press and $73k/year/ binding line in labor savings alone; savings in ink and paper, and an additional $5.6million in Six Sigma Black Belt savings were also achieved. Operations teams owned daily process improvement and were more inclined to sustain the improvements over time. Capital expenditures for the improvements were minimal. Conformance to schedule improved with the reduction in variability and as a result customer service was able to commit to new work within a specified time period with more confidence. In addition, operations team members and leadership experienced less stress in their daily lives.

Additional Examples from Our Diverse Work Experience State-funded research university. State-funded research university. The Grants and Contracts department of a large state-funded research university applied SOS’s Daily Process Improvement (DPI) methodology to their billing processes. Sources of variation in the process were identified, billing processes simplified and standardized, metrics introduced, and personnel trained in the new process. The need to perform manual billing was reduced by 13% and the time to create manual bills was reduced by approximately 25%, allowing the university to recover thousands of awarded funds from federal agencies and research foundations.