Betting the Company (every day): Driving the Bottom Line

At Lone Star, many of us have turnaround experience.  We respect managers who accept the challenge of making tough choices; what staff, assets and funding is needed?

A boss once told me, “Any fool can optimize a single thing.”  His point was managers, and in particular executives, are expected to balance a LOT of things; create value for clients, create opportunity for employees, create returns for the stockholder.  In most cases, they must balance a lot more than just those three.  They have a finance department (or a banker) to deal with, regulators and a host of lawyers.   Kevin Miller, an old friend of Lone Star, calls these “competing stewardships.”

Optimizing operational performance requires the right balance despite complexity and uncertainty.

There are a few common problems we see when we help our clients;

1. Silos damage each other;

   Most modern organization are some sort of matrix. Different functions all have their role.  But they can’t grasp all the complex interactions they impose on each other. Scott Adam’s Dilbert is the chronicle of these follies.  Dilbert is funny because his struggles are painfully and deliciously true.  In trying to be good stewards for the competing stakeholders, all of them suffer in the Dilbert cartoons, and sadly, in real life, too.

2. Complexity;

   The processes for a modern enterprise are complex. The relationships are a tangle.  No one understands them.

3. Uncertainty;

   While everyone in business has a forecast, few represent uncertainty. Your local weather forecaster hasn’t predicted rain without some odds (30% chance of rain) for a long time.  But most business plans ignore uncertainty in purchasing stock, hiring people and forecasting sale.

4. Transparency;

   Most planning models and forecasting tools are “black boxes” and if you are lucky the person running them knows what is “in there.” In most cases, the person doing the forecast got a tool from a vendor, or a spreadsheet from a predecessor. Even the operator doesn’t know what is “in there.”

Lone Star’s Performance Optimization group helps our clients overcome all these for organizations doing manufacturing, logistics, maintenance, training, and other complex industrial processes.

Our advanced modeling methods allow our clients to see how their silos interact.  We cut through complexity.  We represent uncertainty rather than ignore it. Our models are “glass boxes.”  Transparency illuminates interactions among silos which have gone uncorrected for years, even in well run organizations.

Our clients know if their staffing levels are right.  They know whether they can produce next month, and the odds it will match their client demand.  They know a lot more than their competitors, and they make more money. 

This is why our customers have confidently made decisions valued at billions of dollars of business; we help drive their bottom line with more profit and better performance.