We see a couple of trends of significance that we address with our approach to business systems.

The first has been the commoditization of virtually all manufacturing segments and subsequent loss of historical margins. This has driven significant reductions in work force at all levels and unfortunately many times the first cuts were in "non-essential" areas like Process and Quality Engineers and the hands on level operations leaders. Short term the processes continued to run but the intellectual drain and loss of practical operations experience created large gaps in capability.

This has also driven the need for a different focus where all operational decisions are evaluated not in "throughput and efficiency" but in "margin per unit time" impacts. This seems somewhat obvious but with the wildly swinging prices of raw materials and energy the "formulae" is not constant and the traditional plant business systems are not capable of providing the needed feedback/direction to operations to allow them to continuously optimize profitability.

The second has been the merging of technology with processes. Financial systems are spreading their arms into every aspect of the process, maintenance systems are managing purchasing and receiving, process control systems provide inventory management, and there is more information available than any organization has time to sift through. We believe that you have to begin with the end in mind, build into the foundation the "how we will run our business", make the right information available to the right person at the right time to make the right decision. This is not an IT task, this requires not only excellent IT skills but also excellent operations and business skills to take all of the options, find the "best in class" for the given situation, and then forge them together around the one vision.

We can lead the team or provide all or part of the team to develop, train, install, and startup a total Business system that will allow you to maximize the bottom line, predictably and sustainably.