Benchmarking. Re-engineering. Stage Gating. Corporate Score Card. QFD. TQM. EVA. Hot new -- or radically improved -- tools designed to manage business process are the biggest news in corporate America. They get big press. Make the NY Times best seller list. It's hard to fly Business Class without being evangelized by a seat mate with tales of 30% increases in productivity tracing to some hot new tool. The telltales of fad and transient style flutter everywhere.
Get ready for the backlash, right? Wrong. Management tools are for real. They can identify new opportunities. Solve problems. Suggest strategy and set direction with astounding precision. Done properly they can deliver extraordinary gains in speed, productivity, and profitability...in some cases doubling revenues or halving costs.
But management tools are not really a new phenomenon. Every corporation has a tool kit of systems regularly used regardless of whether they call them tools or just use them as commonplace operational procedures. So why their newfound celebrity status? Simple -- in an era focused on productivity, management systems are the keys to doing things faster, better, cheaper. It's what tools were designed to do. And today there is a greater need for breakthrough improvements than any time since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Efforts to merely squeeze out another 5% cost reduction are often neither do-able nor desirable. A decade of downsizing, cost cutting and squeezing incremental gains out of existing systems has pretty much exhausted the opportunity. Squeeze as you may, there's no more toothpaste in that tube.
Clearly there's a need for more new -- or perhaps updated -- tools to manage corporate efforts. Problem is even if managers and the old functional priorities prefer to "invent it here" -- and they will -- there simply is no time or under utilized talent to invent and prove the new systems required to keep ahead of competitors who are beavering away, importing and implementing their own new systems. Rather than re-inventing wheels that already exist on the outside, it is far better to import and modify an existing tool, learn how to use it effectively...and stick to turning out the product or service that feeds the bottom line. Which is precisely the reason we offer eight distinctly different Management Practices procedures.
To review our Management Tools, click on "management tools menu" below.
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