Consulting Services

Most companies hire a consultant for one of two general reasons: they need additional bandwidth to complete a project or keep up with business activity, or they need specific expertise.

Bandwidth is needed when a company simply can’t get everything done. This might be short-term due to a certain project for a defined time period, or it might be a long-term need due to special circumstances, such as exponential business growth or acquiring and bolting on a new company.

Expertise is brought in when employees need to learn something new, like Lean, root cause analysis, or aluminum welding. (I do the first two, but not welding.) Expertise is also requested when a company needs a skill that falls outside their day-to-day needs, such as analyzing a new casting design for porosity using X-ray technology. The company hires an X-ray expert only when needed. (I don’t do X-rays either.)

Many companies face a simultaneous need for expertise and bandwidth. In fact, that’s the most common scenario for my work. Employees are fully loaded (often over-loaded!) and they’re not sure how to get it under control. They need expertise to streamline the work and reduce the time required, and they need additional bandwidth to tackle the defined improvements to reduce the workload. When facing these circumstances, it feels like a catch-22 situation; they can’t streamline work because they’re not sure where to start, and they don’t have available time to study the situation to figure out where to start. That’s when they need help.

There are also times when companies need external help to get out of their own way.

• Some leaders can’t decide on a strategy or deployment approach and they need an external mediator. This is a great role for a senior consultant who can provide strategic vision, business insight, and independent, unbiased input. One of the significant side benefits of this approach is that the consultant takes the role of the team’s facilitator, which frees up other executives to participate fully in conversations while the consultant is the referee.
• Some leadership teams fall victim to group think, where everyone thinks the same way either intentionally or due to a lack of diverse experience and expertise. This is most common in small businesses that have been around for years and have relied on internal employees to climb the ladder into leadership roles. They simply don’t know what they don’t know. This is an expertise gap.
• Some leadership teams struggle with a bully who won’t allow anyone else to have control or input. This is extremely risky – but quite common – when the bully is the owner or CEO. Arrogance plus incompetence is a dangerous combination because a dictator CEO chokes the life out of good leadership teams and their companies. I’ve seen this in person and it is very sad. Sometimes an external person can help tip the scales to a more reasonable and cooperative approach but ofttimes the company is doomed to die a slow death under the CEO’s death grip.

What consulting services does Josette offer?

I prefer to tackle large projects with a defined strategic goal. These projects often take many months with regular interface to keep things moving. The level of engagement is generally more frequent in early days and it tapers off over time as the organization becomes more self-sufficient.

There are also times when an organization needs a temporary executive, a fulltime resource to fill a managerial role either until a permanent resource is hired, or for a certain time period while activity is really high. I’ve filled executive roles in Operations, Materials & Scheduling, and Engineering (product development). Those roles lasted 2 – 8 months and I was located on site while serving in that role.

These are typical projects that are a good fit for my expertise.

• Create corporate-wide or site-wide strategic plan, which is usually a 2-day exercise.
• Cascade strategy throughout the organization. In Lean organizations, this is often called Policy Deployment or Hoshin Kanri, and it takes a few months to do it well.
• Define Lean deployment plan for the entire organization, usually with Value Stream Mapping. This often leads to follow-up support for kaizen events in areas like Lean Conversion, kanban, standard work, daily management (e.g., SQDIP boards), etc.
• Reduce total on-hand inventory. This is a very common request because it frees up cash and space. This is generally a 6- to 12-month undertaking.
• Define or modify materials and scheduling processes to reduce workload, achieve higher inventory turns, free up cash, etc. This almost always leads to kanban activity, which can take several months.
• Create performance management processes to link employee reviews and compensation to the corporate strategy.
• Train executives or employees in strategic planning, Lean, VSM, inventory management, inventory reduction, kanban, critical thinking, etc.