Customer Improvement Models

Businesses come in all shapes and sizes with a myriad of business models, revenue models and cultures. We have our own. For us to work successfully with a customer, our two cultures must be compatible.

The reason a customer would want to work with us in the first place is because they want to make a change in their business. What's more, they intend that change to be an improvement in their business performance. By definition therefore, any customer considering to work with us must already have an improvement approach to their business. The customer already has an idea or framework, methodology, management model or policies and practices on how they go about identifying and implementing changes which are intended to be improvements.

To be successful, therefore, we need to subordinate our approach to the customer's way of working. If they are receptive and we can help them improve their practices along the way then all the better. We certainly embrace any new knowledge and improvements which our clients can bring into our organisation. Whilst the nature of the engagement may be to improve the customer's business, we always benefit from that journey ourselves.

We have experience working with customers with the following improvement motivations. Company's can have different motivations at different times, or all three at once:

For each of these motivations, there are any number of change management models which can be used to implement the improvements. Any particular mode can have one of the following two types of focus:

We try to avoid local focus projects if we can because they nearly always result in a Return on Investment (ROI) of zero or close to it. For much effort and expense there is often hardly any measurable and sustainable real world performance improvement. In contrast, Systemic focus can provide breakthrough, step wise performance improvements that localised thinking would consider impossible.

If we are engaged on a local optimisation project we try to bring our TheoryOfConstraints knowledge to make improvements in the way the project is run or to better define what the expected outcome of the project will be. For instance, many business process redesign projects can never have a dramatic effect on bottom line performance if they are implementing the same business PolicyConstraints. Examples that come to mind are most technology roll out projects such as Customer Relationship Managment (CRM), Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and so on. The true Return On Investment (ROI) of such systems is usually very low (if at all). Such systems are certainly necessary to manage business processes performed by many people to achieve quality and consistency, but they are usually insufficient in and of themselves to deliver the performance improvements used to justify their adoption in the first place.

If, however, some of the old rules and ways of doing business can be critically reviewed then it is sometimes possible to identify and exploit constraints that exist in the customer's organisation. Rather than replace one system with another, both subject to the same business rules, it is better to bring focus to identify where the leverage points in the organisation are. These are the so-called Archimedean constraints.

We partner with many other businesses which provide us with a knowledge buffer to enable us to provide ServicesOnDemand. Sometimes our partners are more suited to work with certain customers than we are, in which case the best thing we can do for the customer is hand them off to our partner.