Process Improvement is What We Do

Quantum Associates, Inc.—“ The Customer Value Creators”—are business management consultants focused on process improvement. Our brand of management consulting specializes in ISO 9000 process improvement (implementation and training), Lean process improvement for service and manufacturing companies, Process Improvement, Six Sigma process improvement, Team Facilitation and Team Building. We work with small –to-Fortune 1000 service and manufacturing organizations helping them provide value to their customers.

Experience

Our professional business management consultants possess a broad range of capabilities and expertise. They are experts at applying theses skills to convert your most challenging business problems into opportunities.

Our strategic partnering model allows us to leverage an extensive network of 20 -30 year veteran operational excellence consultants with the knowledge, experience and industry insights gained through a substantial mix of projects in the service and manufacturing sectors to create customized solutions for you and solve a wide variety of business, leadership, operational, and organizational problems.

Our experience in implementing Lean Manufacturing/Service, ISO 9000, Six Sigma, Business Process Improvement, and other continuous process improvement methodologies is unparalleled.

Solutions Oriented

We are passionate about creating meaningful and sustainable solutions for you. We are confident in and passionate about our ability to implement solutions that deliver excellent value on your investment in our services.

Relentlessly Pursue Value

For more than a decade, our management consultants have helped organizations solve their most pressing problems in nearly all aspects of operations for both the manufacturing and service sectors. As your needs evolve, we adapt by providing new value-added capabilities and new service offerings. Our business management consultants believe there are no limits in our relentless pursuit of creating customer value and operational excellence.

We are very passionate about our work and always enjoy working with your teams to make sustainable business process improvements happen rapidly while simultaneously making your organization self sufficient in the use of the tools and methods. Our mission is to anticipate and meet the process improvement and training needs of our clients with integrity, creativity, and a passion for adding value.

What's In It For You?

Customer value is a function of cost, quality and satisfaction. We will help you effectively create customer value by:

• Controlling costs associated with wasted time and repetition

• Reducing defects and variation

• Improving cycle times

• Improving order-to-cash cycles

• Increasing productivity 25% to 50% or more

• Eliminating unnecessary work to increase capacity
  without added cost

• Aligning your administrative and support processes with manufacturing in lean thinking

• Improving those “fixed” SG&A costs to keep pace
  with economic realities

• Reducing lead time from days to hours

• Decreasing inventory

• Improving overall organizational performance

The Concept of Value

An organization need to determine if the steps and activities of its processes add value in the eyes of the customer. To be a value-added action the activity must meet all three of the following criteria:

1. The customer is willing to pay for the activity.

2. It must be done right the first time.

3. The activity must somehow change the product or service in some manner.
   

If an activity or action doesn't add value then it is waste and you must investigate how to eliminate the activity.

Here are some examples of waste from a cycle time perspective:

Industry	Process	Average cycle time	Value add time	% value add time
Life insurance	New policy application	72 hours	7 minutes	0.16
Commercial banking	Consumer loan	24 hours	34 minutes	2.36
Hospital	Patient billing	10 days	3 hours	3.75
Consumer packaging	New graphic design	18 days	2 hours	0.14
Motor vehicle equipment	Financial end-of-month closing	11 days	5 hours	5.60

As these examples demonstrate non value-add time is greater than 90% of the cycle time which is traditionally true for most processes especially administative processes. You can also translate waste in terms of cost to determine the impact reducing non-value-added activities will have on the bottom line.

Our Approach

1. Harmonize - Organizing management and the leadership team to develop or review vision, mission, and value statements. Identify key processes and conduct an assessment to determine current and future states of the organization.

2. Aim - Developing tangible plans for improving key business processes and the organization as a whole.

3. Perform - Deploying improvement teams to carry out the improvement process.

4. Sustain - Making it stick - institutionalizing process improvement as the way business is done every day.

You can reach us at 847.919.6127

Sign up for our Operational Excellence Newsletter today.

 

Any organization striving to create customer value can benefit from the integration of Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, ISO 9000, and business process improvement principles.

Your organization continues to face increasing customer requirements—the need to reduce costs, competition and shorter lead times. Implementing some of these continuous process improvement concepts in your organization will ultimately improve your bottom line, overall efficiency and customer satisfaction. You can begin your journey to operational excellence by implementing some of the following methodologies:

• Lean Process