Good afternoon operational improvement afficionados!
This week our managing director Eric Hiller published another piece about operational improvement and how to bring principles from Lean, Six Sigma, and VAVE into the discussion, specifically when engaging executives in an operational transformation.
Please see more here!
Eric Hiller is moonlighting on us again! This time he’s back on one of his favorite subjects, or at least two of them:
Although there are 1001 ways to fail at the tactical level of the project in either of these methodologies, it turns out that a lot of times these efforts fail because of executive failures in the project. Eric covers the 10 most common ways that you can sink a DtV or PCM project… and more importantly, how to avoid them!
Check out the article here:
Eric A. Hiller Reviews Top Mistakes Made by Executive Champions in Product Cost Management and DtV
Hello operational improvement fans!
Apparently Eric hiller is cheating on us these days with his own personal website (www.eric-hiller.com). But, we are still happy to pass on his work to you. He just wrote a new piece for medium.com called:
Eric Hiller Provides Operational and Process Improvement Tips
This article is targeted toward executives and high level consultants that are trying to affect a process transformation in their organizations.
Certainly there are 1001 ways to fail in a process transformation in the organization, but in this article Eric’s only going to focus on the top ten (well, 11). On the other hand, if you get these 11 right, you probably will avoid 90% of the pitfalls!
Good morning again, product and service cost management aficionados,
You’ve been waiting for it for awhile I’m sure ! Who doesn’t wait with bated breath for the next installment of knowledge in the product cost management world? Our founder, Eric Hiller, has been very busy with a lot of things lately, but he just completed the herculean task of doing a deep dive review on the SEER by Galorath (published at Spend Matters, where he been filling out a whole series on PCM tools, started with two articles in December 2019 (here and here)
Those of you in the product cost management world, especially if you are in the aerospace and defense industries, know a lot about the SEER suite. It’s been around for over 30 years now, growth in products, depth, and breadth. Much like Eric’s review on aPriori, which was so deep we had to explode it into two parts, the Gallery app suite is so broad that’s been matters needed to split the article into two. Apparently, it’s also so valuable it’s behind their firewall.
Here they are!:
So, you may want to check it out. And if you can’t get there and still need some advice, give us a call and maybe we can help you.
Hello Cost Management aficionados!
We have an exciting new series that our managing partner, Eric Hiller, is writing for Industry Week, who has eagerly accepted all the content. The series is all about how an executive (and other people who are not cost experts) can understand what the cost management team is communicating. The first in the series was just published yesterday. Here is a short snippet as a teaser:
A big part of the communication problem is that there is not just one type of cost model. Cost management is a broad field with a variety of methodologies to address the almost infinite world of situations for which one wants to know the cost of manufacture or service delivery. Even if an executive has some understanding of one particular cost-modeling technique, it can often be confusing when the analytics team uses different technique.
This can lead to uncomfortable meeting, where executives and colleagues outside of the cost management team are confused how to understand the results and/or have low confidence in the results. Conversely, the cost management team may feel frustrated that executives are not listening to them or do not trust their conclusions.
What is the solution? The short answer is that the product cost management team needs to better educate their audiences, not only on their results, but how they got to those results. In addition, it is incumbent upon their colleagues to be willing to learn, and invest the time to become conversant in the terminology of cost management just like they would in other function areas, e.g. product development, purchasing, finance, etc.
Please click this link to read the article: 5 Questions for Better Cost Management Discussions
We look forward to your engagement, comments , and sharing.
Thanks!
Hiller Associates
Hello again cost management aficionados!
Please check it out over at Spend Matters. One caveat: I have been the victim of my own success in that Spend Matters thinks the article such good content that you will see a teaser article and then need to pass through their paywall to see the full analysis.
Here’s a teaser of some of the insight that you’ll get:
Recently, our managing partner, Eric Hiller, published an article at aPriori’s website called:
6 STEPS TO OVERCOMING THE SUPPLY CHAIN CRISIS
The response was so good, that aPriori is having Eric teach as part of a webinar on the subject.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Session 1: 9:00 AM EST | 3:00 PM CET
Session 2: 2:00 PM EST | 8:00 PM CET
COVID-19 has cost a lot of people, governments, businesses, and non-profits. It has also broken down a lot of mental barriers for things that just “couldn’t be done” and slaughtered a lot of sacred cows. And what cows are more sacred than the ivory towers of academia? What is going to happen to education, especially higher education, because of our unfriendly visitor from Wuhan? Find out in Eric Hiller’s latest article where he takes a hard self-reflecting look at if his own undergraduate degree could have been done just as well (or at least well-enough to justify the massive savings) online! It’s just been published at Marketwatch.
Click here to read: Eric Hiller examines Covid 19 effect on higher education
So, you had a supply chain, and you thought it was pretty “optimized.”
Yeah, you could improve it here and there, but you had wrung out 95%+ of the addressable waste.
To really make progress, you would need to make MAJOR changes (new suppliers, locations, etc.), but there just is always other stuff to do.
Then Corona happens!!!!
Your tidy and luxurious platform is now burning.
Now you have no choice but to DO SOMETHING different.
Cost was really important and you thought delivery and quality were assured.
Now delivery is a huge problem (maybe quality too.)
What do you do short term? What do you set up in the future to stop this from happening again?
Find out in Eric Hiller’s new article over at the aPriori blog (which Eric originally started in 2007, when it was “CostCents“) It has been a long time since Eric worked at aPriori or wrote for the blog, but he has some advice now.
Much of the time here at Hiller Associates, we focus on the “Product” in cost management. But, cost management is just a pertinent to services as well.
Our managing partner, Eric Hiller just published an article on the effect that Corona virus has had bars in a cities and the people associated with them.
Check out the published article at Market Watch.
