IntelliVen

IntelliVen worked directly with the CEO, Board, Executive Committee, and 19-member management team of $100M kitchen and bath supplier to develop Next Generation Leaders to conceive, launch, drive, and govern successful change initiatives. Small team work sessions, multi-day management team workshops, board meetings, and initiative reviews provided forums to teach, consolidate, implement, and reinforce Manage to Lead tools, approaches, and principles.

Improved results were realized immediately and at scale. Top management learned how to empower middle managers and process improvement leaders to effectively deliver on the promise of one change initiative after another.

Previously, Reico board had worked with middle managers to identify a portfolio of initiatives to improve performance. For example, one was to improve reporting on work in process so managers could better allocate resources in order to lower margin erosion from inefficient deployment of resources. Another initiative was to lower the time it took to prepare a definitive quote to complete work requested by a customer.

Middle managers had identified what was needed to improve performance and were eager to make progress on their initiatives, but after more than a year none of the initiatives had made much if any progress. The reasons for the lack of progress were discovered to be that no one was entirely clear on what the ultimate goal was to accomplish, no one had been empowered to spend time away from their day-job to work on the initiatives, and top management, while trying to be encouraging and helpful, kept middle managers from making progress by micro-managing, changing course of action on the fly, and so on.

The Process Improvement Program led by IntellIVen:

• Crystalized key metrics and goals across all initiatives.

• Set up, launched, and guided an internal team to guide and govern assigned up-and-coming middle managers who served as Process Improvement Leaders.

• Taught top executives how to support and guide middle managers to successfully complete important initiatives from start to finish.

Two examples are margin erosion and time-to-quote; metrics that were previously not even being tracked:

• Reports to show work-in-process and associated status did not exist. The targeted margin on sales was eroding by 3% which, on revenue of $100M means $3M was being lost each year off the bottom line relative to industry standard performance benchmarks. As a result of the Process Improvement Program margin erosion was reduced by 30% to roughly 2% which, on revenue of $100M, translates to $1M in hard-dollar savings. In the kitchen and bath business, every hard dollar carries with it $2 in soft costs for labor associated with tracking, following up, and so forth. The net impact of completing just this one initiative, therefore, is estimated by management to have been in the range of $3M/year.

• Similarly, the time-to-quote, as a result of the Process Improvement Program, improved by roughly 50% which means that orders got quoted faster and orders into the system sooner (i.e. sales velocity increased), and less soft labor costs associated with following up to resolve why quotes were delayed were reduced correspondingly.

The process described above serves as the foundation for Manage to Lead Immersion Program Topic 6, Plan Change, and Topic 7, Do & Review. The implemented overarching governance system is depicted below:

One of the key accomplishments of the Process Improvement Program at Reico is that the process was set up, implemented, run, and maintained entirely by internal personnel. Within less than one year the internal team was operating without any further outside support from IntelliVen or any other outside help. Since then, executive oversight and support to middle managers who identify and implement improvement initiatives has become a core competence and results continue to soar.

The governance process implemented for Reico has been packaged and made available for middle managers as an optional follow-on program for executive teams that successfully complete the IntelliVen Manage to Lead Immersion Program.

The resultant program is called the IntellIVen Process Improvement Program for Process Improvement Leaders and is specifically designed for organizations whose executive teams seek to train and empower mid-level management to apply their great strengths to help the entire organization reach its potential to perform and grow.