In recent articles we have discussed several aspects of business finance.  Topics so far have included internal controls, capital planning, and managing working capital. While almost every business pays attention to financial performance, studies show that small and medium sized businesses in particular frequently do not engage in thorough financial planning – if at all. 

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In the past few weeks we have been covering important elements of finance processes, including internal control systems as prescribed by Sarbanes-Oxley, and the importance of capital planning to ensure key high level financial facets such cost of capital and return on assets have established goals and are being measured.

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Last week we explored your vision for the New Year and produced an idea for a vision. Now let’s review your business model and see how your end-to-end process design stacks up to deliver your vision.

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Interest in Lean Thinking continues to grow. Many people have attended Lean training to learn the tools used to implement lean. But one question remains for many – how or where do you start to “lean out” your organization?

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Last Month we discussed leadership metrics, leading teams and overall management leadership. But we cannot discuss leadership and teams without discussing supply chains. After all, your supply chain is a

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Question of the month: How do you know if you are using the right metric(s) to measure your leadership effectiveness?

January saw the release of the newest manual in our collection—the ISO 22000 Food Safety Policies, Procedures & Forms. We also discussed leadership in January and announced the 2006 ASQ St. Louis Quality Conference.

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Last week we discussed management leadership as not settling for less and introduced inventory turns as a critical performance metric. This week let’s explore an even more important set of metrics

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Welcome to the New Year. The New Year is the time for leadership to step up and chart the course for the year ahead.

Leaders motivate others by defining goals, setting standards, and determining the minimum acceptable performance. In other words, leadership is a self fulfilling prophesy. It’s about

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Part 4 of a four-part series

Last week, we discussed process improvement half-life, or how long it should take to achieve our target objectives. We also introduced what other resources we need to build our action plan. What’s left? In order to achieve your objectives for

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Part 2 of a four-part series

In part one of this series, we talked about how strategic dysfunction starts when we set the wrong business objectives. The right objectives start with placing “reducing variation” over “increasing mean”. We found that you are just chasing your tail if

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