Where do we start?

The philosophy of business and operations excellence must start at the top.  Identify the needs of your company with a systematic but open book approach.  By this I mean baseline the position of the company and also the competition.  Outline where and on what level the competition lies.  Outline those factors that are key attributes of your industry and eliminate those that are valued by your intended customer as well as by your non-customers.  I'm in the process of reading a book called BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY and will convey my interpretation in the next few weeks.  The basic premise however is to figure out what differentiates your business from the competition.

Balancing the way we think

As companies move forward in the assessment of their success and failures, many identify a need for better project management.  Typically, structure is desired but not so much structure that the team is caught up in an endless loop chasing perfection.  Occassionally teams should come up for air and take a broad look at what they are doing in order to identify impacts to upstream and downstream processes.  Teams should utilize a mixture of product and process expertise with DMAIC or DMADV tools in a balanced manner.

Innovation and Business Excellence

What is the next big thing?

What are incremental changes?

Industry has in some cases moved away from "out of the box thinking". They fail to take a practical approach to the resolution of challenges.

I sometimes say to myself “I could design anything if you locked me in a room long enough". A broader view of that statement observes that I never mentioned being locked in a room with a set of rules. The main point is that I go in the room and come out with some significant idea! Innovation should be free-minded. We look at the world around us and notice trends of life; newspapers vs. internet, film vs. digital, home vs. cell phone.

Be free to generate ideas and once you have a process framework take steps to validate it to ensure business excellence.

Economics and Business Excellence

In today's economic climate companies should be searching for ways to minimize costs. Unfortunately the quickest method of choice is workforce reduction. I propose methods of taking a practical approach to cost reductions as well as opportunities to increase the "delighter" features of your product and services. No matter how much your workforce is reduced, if what you have to offer is not appealing then your business will continue to struggle. See more information at http://sites.google.com/site/devmontagne/home