One constant in business is change.  Globalization, offshoring, 9/11, the rising price of petroleum products, and environmental concerns has fundamentally changed the business of manufacturing.  Manufacturers have other issues within their own businesses which create the need to change business processes for a host of reason such as new product introductions, new customers, loss of contracts, customer based manufacturing lines, geographic expansion/retrenchment, reduction in force  - the list is virtually endless.  Whatever is driving change, the underlying business processes also need to change.  Likewise, the information systems that run daily processes need to reflect those changes or they ceases to support the needs of the business.

Often changing the information systems to support the business processes is a patchwork of change requests.  It is not unusual to see hundreds, occasionally thousands of pending change requests when we do our business audits.  In most companies, the change request log represents several man-years of effort.  Meanwhile the business encounters more change, creating more change requests - often contradicting older pending requests.  

Our approach to getting control of this situation is simple.  We start with a cross-functional team of personnel involved in Order to Cash .  This is the core business process in any business.  With this team we create a “brown paper” flow of the current process.  Next, we create an ideal flow, removing nonvalue-adding, costly activities and redundant processes.   The difference becomes the blueprint to reengineer the business processes.  Change request that do not move the company toward the ideal Order to cash process are eliminated or shelved. 

Our approach is more than simply value mapping the business process but generally follow these steps

·         Business process reengineering

·         Kaizen training

·         ERP implementation or reimplementation

·         User training

·         Business process metrics and savings tracking

Our focus is on practical, proven processes to improve information systems to support your manufacturing operations.