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White Paper: Escape the Improvement Trap

"Cumberland doesn't take a 'Lean Zealot' approach or force a particular set of tools onto the workforce. Rather, their style is to take a business process improvement approach that defines the need, assesses the current state, defines the desired future state, and then works with the team to achieve the future-state goals."

– Bruce Bechtel
VP Operations, Whiting Corp.

"I have belonged to many leadership groups and find The Cumberland Group to provide the highest level of direction and support. They keep our meetings efficient and effective. They have vast knowledge in all aspects of business management and are experts in optimizing the manufacturing process."

– Terry Slade
President, Best Metal Extrusions

Our Key Differentiators

Holistic View of Organizational Performance

• Eliminating waste ≠ Creating more value
• Most people are not highly engaged in their work
• Performance metrics too often do almost as much harm as good
• If leaders fully understood business performance improvement, they would lead in a radically different way

HOW WE WORK

Cumberland services help you improve the way you improve ... faster than your competitors do it! That includes:

Assessments

Establish a baseline of current level of performance, and identify key opportunities for:

• More effective process improvement practices
• More effective level of Improvement Maturity

Team Coaching, Facilitation, Project Management

Your situation: A significant project needs to be done that impacts customer and/or supplier relationship ... it's important to your business. You have internal expertise, but there are challenges and obstacles to making improvement happen.

We work with the people involved within your organization (and, when appropriate, people from your customers and suppliers). We do a blend of facilitation and expertise based on our experience to help the improvement team ask and answer the right questions. Our methods use efficient collaboration and consensus development for:

• Executive/management teams leading improvement initiatives
• Project teams focused on large-scale, critical, or cross-functional processes in serious need of improvement

HOW WE'RE DIFFERENT

Holistic View of Organizational Performance

The basic improvement tools (Lean, Six Sigma, etc.) are very good ... but they are not sufficient to change your competitive position.

Two major developments came from our experience:

• Business Process Model — This puts customers, products, services, processes, and support systems in context, so improvement happens in the right sequence. Typical responses are: "Now we know why this didn't work before."
  
• Improvement Maturity (IM) Model — Weak or missing ingredients typically doom continuous improvement initiatives to mediocre results. Your organization gets better, but your competitive position does not change. If you wish to move to an elite level of improvement effectiveness, you must do something different than your (or your competitors') past practices.
  

Team-Based, Collaborative, Consensus Methods

People-based differentiators (vs. technologies) are difficult for competitors to copy. That truism is embedded in everything we do. Client reactions are usually: "Wow, this cut our project time in half with better results!"