Innovation Consultancy Partnership has a quite unique business assessment model, based on Six Sigma. The assessment tool has 92 questions covering 16 areas, important in business transformation. This enables an organisation to determine, not only how effective it is in implementing Six Sigma across the organisation, but also to identify the main areas to measure and improve.

A view from the bridge

The main, high level areas are; competence, project & team selection, implementation and infrastructure, as shown in the diagram;

This is a simple yet powerful tool that is used by individual Six Sigma teams, or the Senior Team to identify main areas of weakness, and/or differences of opinion. It is based on the Ishikawa Diagram – with each on the main ribs having four further measurement areas.

You can complete the relevant parts appropriate to your focus, or the whole assessment. Each question is rated against set criteria important for a successfully transforming an organisational using a Six Sigma or similar approach.

The output is presented graphically on an Impact Diagram – this allows priorities to be determined based on importance and rating scores

This is a tried and tested complete “one-stop” model for managing customers & improving performance.

It is a process that trains and equips your people to conduct customer research and to use the feedback for Continuous Improvement at all levels in the organization.

We design a survey with you to meet your requirements within up to 10 key elements and gathers specific comment on:

• Things valued by customers
• Things to improve
• Future requirements

We have made substantial improvements for our clients in the areas of;

• reduced waste
• improved market position
• protection of lead over competitors.

The process is adopted in three stages;

Stage 1: We agree the business elements to be covered by Feebak, select the customers, a coordinator and select and train researchers.

Stage 2: Research interviews are conducted. We then analyse the raw data, interpret the data into useful information and present the finding to management.

Stage 3: Improvement plans are established with the team and improvement teams are trained to implement the action plans. Then procedures are put in place to monitor success and these new ways of working and performance achievements are fed back to the customers and staff.

Customer Satisfaction Index:

A customer satisfaction index that measures how confident the customer is in your ability to meet their requirements consistently and to an agreed standard is developed. This translates customer perceptions and feelings into measurable values and highlights strengths and weaknesses of product/service offering.

This satisfaction index indicates trends and helps to build relationship with customers, manage the customer base and highlight areas for profitable growth.

Every process must be measured in some way. What gets measured gets done and without good measures in place then we do not know how well the process is performing or that objectives are being met!

On-line process measures concentrate on the vital few characteristics, are realistic and within influence of the person owning the process and agreed with the customer and / or manager. Their focus must be on developing ‘prevention’ measures that give information on how well the process is performing, rather than those that simply record failed outcomes.

Measuring the Process:

Statistical Process Control:

This is a major quality improvement and cost reduction tool in its own right.

Statistical Process Control (SPC) is extremely versatile and Innovation Consultancy Partnership Limited has many years of experience in implementing SPC across all sectors, both manufacturing and service, even the police force.

From the front-line process operator to the CEO, everyone can have access to this visual trend information that provides a movie picture of what is happening, in any part of the operation. For example, in; sales, administration, production, finance, material supply etc.

It says how well a process can realistically perform based on its’ design, and categorises the reason for potential failure due to natural, ‘inherent’ process variation, or due to special causes.

It is an on-line process measure that prevents problems and suggests ways of tackling them.

Control charts are used for this purpose that tell us the chance that a genuine change has occurred and allows us to recognises the risks involved.

The control chart discriminates between NATURAL causes and SPECIAL causes, and signals when a process needs to be adjusted. It provides predictable information about a process when it is in control, and a common language for communicating information on process conditions.

Our clients have made substantial and sustainable savings with statistical process control.

We provide the following training and consultancy services in specific process areas / departments or organisation-wide;

• Manager awareness workshops
• Operator training on the development and use of control charts using bespoke process data for both variable and / or attribute data
• On-line process/skill coaching to introduce and interpret control charts
• Full Implementation programme

Overall Process Effectiveness:

Overall Process Effectiveness (OPE) is a measure created by Innovation Consultancy Partnership from our work in the field of implementing Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), and Total Quality Management (TQM).

The original measure, called Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) was developed by the Japan Institute for Plant Maintenance (JIPM) and identifies the major causes of failure due to the ‘Six Losses’; namely;

• Breakdowns/machine failures
• Setup and adjustment
• Small stoppages during the process
• Speed losses, with machines running at less than optimum speed
• Rejects during production
• Rejects during running in/ warm-up

Overall Process Effectiveness (OPE) is not simply about equipment performance but considers the performance of the whole process performance associated with the equipment in question.

We use SPC control charts to align, monitor and improve all three parts of the measure, namely; utilisation, performance and quality.

Do you know how well you measure up against World Class?

We provide the following training and consultancy services to introduce OPE on specific equipment, within a department or across the whole operation;

• Manager awareness workshops
• Operator training using bespoke process data for variable and/or attribute data
• On-line process/skill coaching to introduce and interpret control charts
• Full Implementation programme