Operations Diagnostic

Matching Work Processes
to Strategic Direction

Many organizations have a top-level strategy in place to guide their growth—but few have supported that strategy with a redesign of the work processes needed to achieve it. And, too often, the business' overall strategy and daily work processes are working at cross-purposes, impeding the realization of long-term results.

To help its clients to understand and address their operations challenges—and the contribution of work processes to strategic growth—GMT has created a unique operations assessment capability.

Through this service, clients can quickly—and cost-effectively—identify and prioritize needed process improvements.

An Objective Look at Current Processes
Creating a Shared Operations Vision
The Result: Prioritized Action Plans
The GMT Difference

An Objective Look at Current Processes

GMT begins the diagnostic process with a thorough review of the client's current work processes. Led by a crossfunctional operations team, this review includes:

	Interviews with executives to understand the business' strategic goals—and the way work flows through the organization
	Review of existing data on such performance measures as customer satisfaction, inventory levels, cycle times, and backlogs
	Process mapping to identify work handoffs, system interfaces, and "quick hit" improvement opportunities
	Development of a customer model that demonstrates how—and how well—customers are being served today

After this initial phase of discovery and information gathering, GMT leads client team members in summarizing the major process issues identified.

Common issues that GMT helps team members to identify and understand—as well as begin to address—include redundant systems, irrelevant metrics, long cycle times, and a poor understanding of who manages customer relationships.

To help the business understand its own unique issues—and create an achievable vision for the future—GMT also may recommend that team members visit with select customers, as well as benchmark their company's performance against businesses that have overcome similar challenges.

At the conclusion of this exercise, team members have a clear understanding of their company's operations and processes today—as well as the performance gaps they must address to successfully deliver the business' top-level strategy.

Creating a Shared Operations Vision

GMT next leads client team members in elaborating on their operational vision for the future—by developing high-level plans that include the new operations architecture, process flows, and systems infrastructure.

Team members conduct a workshop with senior executives to gain their concurrence on both major performance issues and plans for improvement. Team members and top managers agree on new process and customer initiatives, competencies on which to focus, resource priorities, and high-level process flows.

While operations managers can be confident that senior executives understand their plans at a high level of detail, the senior management team can verify that the company's operations are moving in the right direction to achieve the long-term strategy.

The Result: Prioritized Action Plans

Following their meeting with senior executives, team members develop prioritized high-level action plans, estimated costs, and resulting savings for the initiatives.

While every operating plan is different, depending on the organization's unique performance challenges, common improvement initiatives include:

	Building better linkages between back-end and customer systems
	Integrating information support systems
	Aligning performance metrics with the overall business direction
	Reducing cycle times and work handoffs
	Leveraging supplier relationships
	Linking product management and customer administration

In order to achieve these types of sweeping improvements, team members define clear roles and accountabilities among operations personnel—as well as identify a sponsor on the executive team who will support their continued efforts.

The GMT Difference

While many consulting firms offer assessment capabilities, GMT's approach differs in a number of critical ways.

First, GMT ensures that the diagnostic process is led and championed by a crossfunctional team of managers from across the company's operations—representing such diverse functions as order entry, customer service, finance, logistics, procurement, and inventory management. This broad representation ensures that all issues will be studied—and that ownership and accountability will remain after the initial assessment is completed.

In addition, by involving senior executives, GMT's diagnostic process ensures that all operations plans are aligned with the top-level strategy and direction—and have management support.

Finally, GMT's operations assessment process provides a disciplined, cost-effective means for client businesses to understand and address their biggest operations performance gaps quickly—leading to both short-term and long-term profitability benefits.