We have one clear goal: Help clients succeed on their most important, most valuable business improvement efforts.
We all use technology, but it is not at the core of what we do. The Lab focuses on revenue impeding, resource wasting, non-technology improvements that hide in plain sight. 75% of all improvements are “non-technology.”
Our template-based approach makes rapid, large-scale, activity-level improvement feasible by capitalizing on similar opportunities across common functions and industries. No more re-inventing the wheel.
We work alongside internal teams to design a self-funding implementation plan. Once implementation begins, financial break-even is typically achieved in six months. Our work is guaranteed to pay for itself.
In 1993, alumni from the world's largest, best-known management consulting firms joined forces to focus exclusively on solving the problems that cause most process improvement initiatives to fail.
They adopted a unique approach. Most consultants enter the business seeking intellectual stimulation, so every project starts with a clean sheet of paper. The Lab's founders launched with a different goal: Create an approach using research into what has worked at real companies. Then capture this research in a database that can be applied immediately to other companies with minor modification.
The Lab has catalogued operations at more than 75% of the Fortune 500 companies. Over 10,000 improvements have been documented through contact with 150,000+ employees from hourly workers to C-Suite executives.
Broadly applicable to many companies and industries.
Support Groups:
Line Groups:
Supply Chain Operations:
Operations which are unique to particular business segments and industries.
Services:
Supply Chain:
Never.
In fact, internal teams provide roughly 2/3 of our new client introductions. The Lab works side-by-side with existing teams to increase the improvements and benefits they deliver.
No, not at all.
A recent project included a ten person, all-black-belt client team. Two members were master black belts and half of the team were registered professional engineers.
Simple: More hard dollar benefits.
The Lab rapidly delivers improvements and benefits that the teams would not otherwise identify. Without templates, large scale, activity-based improvement is simply impractical for internal teams – too slow, costly and labor intensive.
Any and all that work.
The Lab’s improvement templates incorporate numerous proven methodologies: Six Sigma, Continuous Improvement, Lean Six Sigma, Voice of the Customer, Benchmarking, Best Practices, Business Process Mapping, Value Stream Mapping, Workflow Analysis and others.
Analytical scope.
Internal teams typically focus on a few large improvement issues: a business process, a technology, or an operational problem. The Lab comprehensively analyzes organizational capacity [i.e., labor] as defined by head count. Within this group, The Lab analyzes activity-level operations: business processes, transactions, etc. Individual projects range in size from 75 to more than 15,000 employees.
Options are numerous.
Most sponsors select an organization and focus on the processes within that group. Again, group size ranges from 75 to more than 25,000 employees.
The fee is based on the size and location(s) of the organization.
The Lab eliminates risk and uncertainty for clients by quoting a lump sum, guaranteed fixed price, which includes travel and all other project related expenses.
Very little.
The Lab’s approach is designed to require a minimum of our client’s time and to do so in brief increments – typically one hour per meeting commitment. The Lab maintains a frugal approach to consumption of client time in both phases of an improvement project.
Less than six months.
All Phase I (Analysis & Design) projects finish in eight weeks or less. When The Lab is involved in Phase II, we target the delivery of measurable benefits to begin approximately six to eight weeks after the start of implementation.
A wide range of operational improvement benefits.
The Lab’s projects typically and simultaneously target a diverse group of operational improvement benefits such as improved customer service (internal and external), error reduction, reduced processing cycle times, overtime reduction and much more.
All benefits are client prioritized and approved.
Clients review and accept all proposed benefits before they are counted as “delivered.” The Lab reviews findings and quantification methods at a detailed level with clients throughout each phase of the project.