Company profile:

• The largest non-profit health plan in the United States offering a fully-integrated health delivery system for its more than 8.7 million members nationwide
• Courier Services group provides time-sensitive support services, including same-day transportation of critical materials, records, medical supplies, and equipment, to the entire Southern California region

Business challenge:

• Operation needed to assess its internal performance due to its fragmented IT systems, limited management reporting, poor efficiency, and ineffective outreach to its primary customers across the region
• Group required specific recommendations to put central controls in place to manage outside courier spend which was increasing dramatically

Process improvement and project management solutions provided include:

• Created master project work plan with major milestones and critical deliverable dates to manage this fast-moving operations assessment
• Performed current-state analysis of business processes and evaluated technical infrastructure and IT tracking and reporting systems
• Facilitated interactive group visioning and design sessions with management and key stakeholders to gather future business requirements and develop a vision for optimizing group performance
• Determined best central hub location and developed new “stat” services, static route, “specials”, and combined vehicle load delivery models to maximize efficiency and harmonize functioning across the region
• Prepared and presented executive summary report of all assessment findings and recommendations for enhancing processes and critical operating systems

Key business results:

• Identified $1.5-3M of potential annual savings, including significant reduction in outside courier spend, along with numerous opportunities for immediate performance improvement
• Designed long-range plan for relocating courier hub and better utilizing shipping and receiving drop areas across the region to expedite courier operations
• Greatly improved customer relations and collaboration with internal courier services group

The Plus Delta team quickly – and successfully – identified several critical changes to improve our business practices. Beyond that, they engaged all our key stakeholders and bargaining groups in a collaborative process to evaluate these solutions and chart a course for future action.

- Project Director, Supply Chain

Has your company ever hired a consulting firm that seemed to stick around the organization far longer than they needed to? Or while they were there, you didn’t see any tangible deliverables or any measurable improvements in your organization’s performance? These scenarios are not uncommon and they’re extremely frustrating.

Chances are, what you really need is to understand what’s going on in your organization today, so that you can take immediate action to improve performance tomorrow. Additionally, you probably want to produce quality results NOW, not in six months from now.

In order to improve performance quickly – across the organization – it’s essential to understand your current operating state. Understanding today’s complex business landscape requires gathering a host of information about the organizational system (Salem, 2002). Gathering this information quickly helps you identify the appropriate solutions that can yield the most immediate results.

To expedite this process, Plus Delta has developed a rapid approach to measuring your organization’s health and wellness. As part of this effort, we assess your business environment and perform an extensive analysis of several different performance factors. And with Quick Pulse, we do so effectively within only a few working days! To achieve this objective, we use a variety of proven tools and project accelerators to complete the following activities:

• Executive interviews – Conduct personal interviews with key stakeholders to understand individual perspectives about organizational performance
• Feedback sessions – Facilitate larger focus group sessions to gather specific feedback from employee work groups
• Process analysis – Create high-level process flow diagrams to document standard operating procedures and review basic work functioning
• Climate survey – Administer an online survey to assess organizational climate and quickly gauge employee sentiments about the organization

By utilizing this disciplined approach to assessing organizational health and wellness, Plus Delta can deliver a summary report of key findings and conclusions in 30 days – or less. We then recommend solutions that will improve performance across the organization. Finally, we help you prioritize these recommendations through an implementation roadmap to guide the ongoing initiatives.

Can Plus Delta help improve your organization’s health and wellness? To learn more about our Quick Pulse approach, please call Dr. Jeremy Lurey directly at +1 (310) 589-4600 or send him an email at jslurey@plusdelta.net

How many times have you said to yourself, “I know we could be even better…” but not known what to do to achieve those results? The problem for most people isn’t recognizing that there is a better way to do things. It’s figuring out exactly what to do and moving from “even better” to “even better if…”!

We’re currently in the midst of tremendous uncertainty and economic turmoil throughout the country and around the world. As a result, companies are under even more pressure than usual to streamline operations and improve organizational performance. At times like this, traditional approaches to organizational change won’t deliver the kinds of transformational results anyone wants – or needs – to achieve their intended results.

For example, you might see an opportunity for improvement in one particular area of the business and leverage your core strengths to change the way that work group functions. Or maybe you do some external benchmarking and decide to implement an industry “best practice” approach with that work group. These changes may help for awhile, but they probably won’t have the lasting impact you want them to have. More importantly, these changes are likely to create new problems in other areas of the business.

Why is that? Why does a change in one group cause problems somewhere else in the organization? Well, imagine a high-performance bicycle wheel with four spokes. The spokes of the wheel represent your company’s strategy, processes, systems and people. Now imagine that you change one of the spokes to be bigger or longer than the other three in an attempt to make that one spoke “even better”. How well will that wheel roll now that one of the spokes has improved strength and durability?

Each of these key elements in your organization is related to each other. That means when you change one thing in isolation, you impact everything else. Each part of the organization, including its divisions, departments, functions, and work groups are sub-systems within the overall company. Therefore, changes in one area of the business have significant implications for other areas too.

This common approach to implement organizational changes in isolation is a major reason why as little as 20% of all large-scale change efforts achieve their intended business results. To be effective, we need a more integrated approach. If we don’t look at our organizations as complete systems, we may achieve incremental gains in certain areas, but we surely won’t be effective in creating sustainable change across the entire organization.

At Plus Delta Consulting, we have shown numerous business leaders the systematic steps to take to realign their efforts and increase their team’s effectiveness. Rather than take a myopic view of any organization, we use a more integrated approach and focus our efforts on all four of the following performance factors that are critical to the success of creating sustainable change across an organization:

• Business Strategy – An organization’s business strategy clearly articulates the vision and longer-term objectives for that organization.
• Operating Processes – Defined business processes operationalize the strategic direction within separate but complementary work functions. If the strategy dictates “what” an organization will do, these processes demonstrate “how” they will get there.
• Technology Systems – Whether they are manual or leverage more advanced technologies, an organization’s operating systems enable the tactical execution of their core business processes to occur.
• People & Culture – Last but not least, people use the established systems to perform the actual process tasks that help the organization achieve its key business objectives.

When we use this integrated approach with our clients, we typically start with a Quick Pulse assessment to quickly determine what’s working well as well as what may need to be changed within each performance area. Through this disciplined diagnostic approach, we conduct executive interviews, facilitate employee feedback sessions, perform high-level process analyses, and oftentimes administer an organizational climate survey to get a full picture of the organization’s strategy, process, systems and people. We then use this information to make specific recommendations to improve performance and prepare a suggested roadmap for change.

At the end of this process, our goal is for our clients to complete the statement, “We would be even better if…” As we said before, most people know there is a better way. They just don’t know exactly what to do. So we partner with our clients to prioritize any number of possible actions and then implement those changes to get the organization to the next level. And our commitment is to complete the initial Quick Pulse assessment in 30 days or less so that they can more quickly take that next step towards achieving their intended results.

Can Plus Delta help you create sustainable changes and produce “even better” results? To learn more about our integrated change approach, give us a call at +1 (310) 589-4600 or send an email to info@plusdelta.net