Aligned for Results...

The Competitive Advantage in a Global Marketplace

 

ACCELERATING IMPROVEMENT REMOTELY

At DRIVE, we have reduced travel significantly in response to client travel restrictions with COVID-19.  In this time, we have learned a lot about how to support and coach improvement remotely.  We have conducted Rapid Improvement Events (RIE’s), problem solving coaching, and even Strategic Improvement Planning (SIP) sessions in 2 hour increments with regional and global teams working from home.  Collaboration software like MS Teams has been far more effective than we would have ever imagined.  What we’re learning is that these events are getting accomplished with excellence even without all of us being together on-site. 

 We’re able to support with less time and of course, with no travel costs.  It has us thinking that we need to change our paradigms around how we support / engage manufacturers.  Rather than trying to fit everything we do into full week events, we can look at spreading it out over multiple weeks, a few hours per day, and still get a great outcome and even higher ROI!  The use of the MS HoloLens glasses has been very useful as long as someone (either client or Drive practitioner) is able to be on-site (figure 1).

 

We have conducted a Value Analysis / Value Engineering Rapid Improvement Event fully remotely (not having stepped foot into the client location at any time) and were able to identify a 15% reduction in cost (as a percentage of Cost Of Goods Sold – COGS)! 

We believe that this newly formed paradigm is far more effective than our old thinking of event-based improvement on consecutive days.  Now, to be sure, there is nothing that we found to be better than all of us being together on-site.  We still like to step-in-circle, get shoulder-to-shoulder with a person, and get finger-tip close to the problem.  But we find that we can better prepare a site for a visit and better support post-event follow-ups utilizing this technology.  It’s also quite helpful to get more people involved without having to travel to one site.  This is especially helpful for a global team!  Even Toyota, the benchmark for Genchi Genbutsu (Go and See), is rethinking the need for so much travel and meetings.  Please click the link to Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s thinking on the matter here: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/05/13/business/corporate-business/coronavirus-akio-toyoda-toyota-japan/#.Xr0llyxq0lQ

This new paradigm is a must for all of us right now, and we don’t know when travel restrictions will be removed.  Here is a force-field diagram showing the pluses of both remote and on-site partnership. 

Don’t let your teams use COVID as an excuse for not meeting improvement targets!  This is the perfect opportunity to stay the course!

At DRIVE we have modified our support structures and can help greatly, including the rental of the glasses, as needed.  As you are interested, please don’t hesitate to contact Paul Eakle at 865-323-3491 or e-mail us at paul.eakle@driveinc.com

As we work throughout North America, we see companies with bright people too busy drowning to learn how to swim. Everybody has a plan to get better but few have the means for effective sustainable improvement.

Drive, Inc. is a team of improvement veterans that is dedicated to the successful application of improvement principles to produce profound change in your organization. We have the skill, experience and knowledge to align and focus all resources on enterprise-wide excellence in a globally competitive marketplace.

Drive, Inc. is not a group of theorists. We are highly experienced improvement implementation professionals with over one hundred million dollars of quantifiable annualized return for our clients. Each Drive, Inc. consultant is a profit-driven business leader with over twenty years experience implementing improvements in sales, marketing, engineering, human resources, logistics, supply chain, warehouse, order management, and operations processes.

Our experience is applied from executive management to the process operator level.  We have worked in thousands of locations across six continents focused on executive coaching, management alignment, strategic improvement planning, simultaneous engineering, process capability and stability, flow creation, work standardization, visual management, problem solving, and sustainment of efforts.

We are obsessed with building organizational capability, intentionally driving the culture and achieving bottom-line results.  Global competition demands that you solve your biggest problems. Drive, Inc. is your competitive advantage and the catalyst to achieve results.