My guest, Scott Wilks, was part of a Fortune 500 company undergoing the enormous stress of a Chapter 11 Reorganization, during an entire industry downturn. He was assigned to the corporate team tasked with repairing the seemingly broken business processes that surely had helped contribute to the bankruptcy.
Scott Wilks, Sr. Business Process Enhancement Exec.
With the support of many very talented consultants looking at the key underperforming business metrics, Scott conducted many lean business process improvement workshops to document significant cost savings and performance gains that could be achieved by fixing the suboptimal processes and procedures negatively impacting these metrics.
Scott told me that, “While the process was successful at the completion of this very reactive, shot-gun approach, “Neither the team nor the consultants had a defined method to quickly approve, communicate and implement the new, leaned-out common processes across seven large divisions globally in order to actually realize any of the dollar gains!”
After the consultants departed, as is the case in so many situations, the issues still existed. This left Scott and his team alone without a sustainable continuous improvement
process. I asked Scott what he did next. He said, “I created a new Corporate CM2-based change management process, with CM2 being the industry standard for configuration management. Within months the new corporate change process was in-place and fully functioning and within a year we had already achieved over $100 million dollars in actual cost savings and performance gains! “
Scott integrated this change process into the enterprise value stream monitored key company performance metrics and then initiated lean continuous improvement activities so that, “Not only was there an improved bottom line but it also became an enterprise operating system, not a sporadic event – that was a real game-changer! Another real impact is that any size company within any industry can apply this systematic approach and benefit, since (whether they realize it or not) they all have some form of Enterprise Value Stream defining and managing their business and determining their overall results. Moreover, all of the business processes, within all of the functional groups within the company are key inputs and contributors to an enterprise value stream; HR, Finance Sales, Legal, Engineering, Supply Chain, Quality, etc.…and what all of their individual processes collectively produce as outputs are demonstrated in a company’s bottom-line financial and performance results,” Wilks said..
Wilks also said, “What is exciting about the approach is that all of the potential cost savings and performance gains are all totally within a company’s control – they can use the operating system as aggressively and as often as they like, it’s their choice!”
Watch full video interview below.
Scott Wilks can be reached via LinkedIn or his Career WebFolio.
Fred Coon, CEO
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