|
Issue #137
Hi Friend,
Back in the 1990’s I worked with a CEO who was a genius at extracting value from consultants. His approach was simple: when a consultant provided a proposal to assist with advice he would:
- Strip back the work to its bare essentials
- Insist on access to the top senior talent at the firm
- Minimize the use of junior staff
- Compress the program into specific, short, sharp chunks
His view was that the consultants should already understand the issues so they just needed to understand his business. He then reasoned that the most value for him is created in extracting what the consultants know in a series of focused interactions. This approach made him very popular with shareholders and much less popular with consultants!
For me these are lessons that I have never forgotten and they form the basis of the way I design our services to clients.
For example, my Snapshot Review is a diagnostic spare parts management process audit or ‘health check’ that includes benchmarking your performance against our database. The service typically involves just 5 days onsite and it is the combination of tools and experience that makes this possible. I have been delivering this service to companies all over the world for more than 12 years so I know that the process works. Check out our testimonials page http://www.initiateaction.com/Phillip_Slater_testimonials.htm
For companies that already know their direction but want some additional guidance by, as that CEO put it, ‘extracting what the consultants know’, I offer a Leadership Subscription through our SparePartsKnowHow service. This involves direct access to me on a monthly basis in a series of short, sharp, focused interactions. Plus you get 24/7 access to all the resources at SparePartsKnowHow. In a recent project with a global client some sites took up this access and some didn’t. Those that did outperformed those that didn’t by a factor of 300%,
I know that the CEO from my past would love these services because they get to the heart of the matter without the fluff.
If you are interested to learn more about these services you can read about the Snapshot Review at http://www.initiateaction.com/Inventory_Management_Consulting.htm
and the Leadership Subscription at http://sparepartsknowhow.com/ready-spare-parts-leadership/#.VFqmMIfiY9p
Keep on improving,
Phillip Slater
Founder, SparePartsKnowHow.com
|
