Our way of working

Our approach is one of our critical success factors. We use a teaching-coaching-mentoring approach based on the following principles:   

Participation: it is crucial that especially the people that are performing the operational activities are aware and convinced of problems. They need to be included in the improvement effort with regard to their own work situation. After teaching them the necessary analysis and improvement tools, we coach them towards improvements that have a high degree of implementation success due to the high level of acceptance by the people. It is about opening their eyes to the improvement potential and creating ownership of continuous improvement.

Knowledge transfer: We do not just provide consulting activities or improvements developed by our people, we teach your associates our approach to improvement and the different tools that are needed to make this type of project successful. This way, we bring your people to a higher level of knowledge, which has a positive impact on the continuous improvement performance and culture of your organization. Once your associates are able to apply the newly acquired knowledge in practice we switch from a coaching to a mentoring mode: we will be the sounding board when deploying the improvement strategy throughout the organization, and we will then support your organization to making the step to the next maturity level.

We work based on a Business Model that defines an overall approach for performance improvement, not stand alone initiatives. Learning and applying productivity improvement techniques or implementing Lean is never a goal in itself, it is the means to an end: improving the competitiveness of your organization. We can help to link your improvement initiatives to the mission/vision and strategy of your organization.

Taking into account these basic principles, in our typical approach for coaching improvement projects, we will have plenary sessions with your improvement team on a periodic basis. After each session, we will have an action item list with preparation work that needs to be performed by the team members before the next plenary session.

Although this approach needs a more substantial time investment from the team members and the organization, the implementation success will be greater. Besides learning how to use the tools and analysis techniques, participation of the people will increase and hence, the acceptation of the improvements by the operational people. And, as continuous improvement for any organisation cannot only rely on external people or intervention, our approach offers an exit strategy by offering different intensity levels of our involvement (teaching-coaching-mentoring).