Does keeping your operational processes running smoothly feel like a challenge as your company grows?

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Contempora takes immense pride in its corporate slogan and reputation: Solid Building, On Time, On Budget. However, rapid growth began to strain their internal operations.
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The Challenge: Upstream Friction Points and Balancing Capacity

After working with George and Jason and their management team for a few years, their processes were experiencing natural strain under the pressure of increased volume. The primary challenges were occurring right at the front end of the client experience:

• The company was finding it difficult to get designs, estimates, and proposals back to clients in a timely fashion.
• They were sometimes missing proposal dates committed to by sales.
• The internal time lag between a signed contract and the actual hand-off to the Construction team was longer than desired.

Because their workflow wasn't fully standardized, the amount of duplicated effort in design and estimating was increasing. And George, who was also carrying the weight of being the primary salesperson, found himself heavily involved in the daily mechanics of operations.

1. Understanding the Whole System

To navigate this, the team needed to transition from being "time tellers" to "clock builders," treating their business as an integrated flow of interdependent functions rather than separate departments. 

Early in our work together, we mapped out their Key Function Flow Map (KFFM) to visualize exactly how work moved from an initial prospect into the company and down to the job site.

As volume grew, this bird’s-eye view helped to surface that front-end delays in Pre-Construction (Sales, Design, and Estimating) were impacting the downstream Construction team, shifting project start dates and delaying in-year revenues.

2. Diagnosing Operational Systems

At one point, we used the KFFM Heat Map traffic-light system to diagnose their primary operational constraints. While the downstream Construction team initially showed Red, that diagnostic exercise revealed that the core bottleneck was actually a friction point upstream, being Pre-Construction.

Furthermore, as we dug deeper, we discovered a constraint within that constraint: within the Pre-Construction process itself, the Design department was the ultimate bottleneck. Pushing proposals through with varying procedures was stretching Design's capacity and reducing their ability to turn sold jobs into usable drawings for Construction.

3. Process Mapping and Optimization

I coached the Pre-Construction team through an exercise to map their current workflow. We quickly discovered that projects were being handled differently. There was no single process being consistently followed. This lack of standardization caused occasional rework, extra touch-points with prospects, and delays.

Rather than spending time trying to map a variable current process, we immediately hashed out what the standard, optimized steps should be. We standardized exactly how work should move through each stage of proposal development. By creating a predictable sequence, the team would be able to balance the workload in Design and Estimating, ensure more predictable turnaround times, and reduce the time lag between a signed contract and the Construction hand-off.

4. Employee-Involved Change Leadership

Optimizing processes can never be a top-down exercise. Originally, George considered asking his new salesperson to design a sales process to present to the managers. I counseled him instead to actively involve his pre-construction team from the start, because “people support what they help to create.”

George and his pre-construction team all fully engaged in the process optimization work. Together, they worked through their varying departmental perspectives, aligned their approaches, and arrived at a standardized Pre-Construction process they all thoroughly understood, believed in, and were committed to living by.

The Turnaround: Navigating the Implementation Phase

Transitioning a business toward systemized excellence is a journey, and it often requires course-corrections along the way. The team initially created an implementation plan to improve scheduling of Design and Estimating work to better manage department capacity. However, they initially found it a challenge to execute the scheduling piece due to a skill gap in their pre-construction team.

Recognizing this constraint, the company made a strategic pivot. They hired a dedicated Pre-Construction Manager who possessed solid scheduling skills alongside a deep understanding of sales, design, and estimating. This new leader operationalized the process, bringing accountability and scheduling discipline to the system.

The Result: CEO Freedom to Scale

By designing a disciplined system, Contempora protected and reinforced its reputation for delivering Solid Building, On Time, On Budget.

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.

​What if the secret to building a truly scalable company wasn't found in a dry operations manual, but in a gripping business novel about a plant manager on the brink of shutdown?

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​A Systems Thinking Approach
 
The premise of The Goal is built on the practice we recommend of "Understanding the Whole System."
 
He introduces three core measurements: throughput (the rate the system generates money through sales), inventory (money tied up in what you intend to sell), and operating expense (what you spend to turn inventory into throughput).
 
The goal is to increase throughput while simultaneously reducing the other two. Not one at a time. This combined goal results in both increased revenue and better profitability. Your company is one integrated system, and every executive decision either helps or hurts that goal.
 
Goldratt argues that most companies are destroying their own performance by optimizing individual departments or production stations in isolation, exactly what happens when managers just manage their own turf instead of the integrated flow of the business.
 
The Key Function Flow Map that we recommend, mapping the inputs, outputs and flows between each function at every level of the company, is what helps executive teams maintain this birdseye view.
 
Diagnosing Constraints
 
Goldratt introduces the Theory of Constraints: every system has at least one constraint that governs the throughput of the entire operation.
 
He illustrates this with a boy scout hike. The troop can only move as fast as the slowest hiker, no matter how fast the kids at the front walk. The solution isn't to push everyone harder. It's to put the slowest kid at the front, lighten their pack, and pace the whole group to their speed.
 
Pushing more volume through every department doesn't increase your overall throughput, it just piles more work in front of your bottleneck.
 
So a key first step is to identify the system’s constraint: the process, department or production station that is holding up the hike.
 
Mapping and Optimizing Processes
 
The next step is understanding exactly how the one constraint currently operates and where it's losing capacity. Current-state process mapping helps reveal what steps in the constraint process are causing the bottleneck, through redundant or unnecessary work, inconsistencies, and errors.
 
Once that local process is optimized, every other process should be run in lockstep with its cadence, so as to not overload it. This whole systems approach maximizes the throughput, while minimizing inventory and operating expense, thereby maximizing profits.
 
Once you've squeezed all you can out of that constraint and aligned other processes with it, invest in increasing its capacity so it is no longer the constraint, thereby increasing the whole system’s throughput potential.
 
Once it is no longer a constraint, another constraint will surface. Repeat this approach.
 
One of Goldratt’s most counterintuitive points: a workplace where everyone is always busy is a sign of inefficiency. Non-bottleneck areas running flat out generate cost without generating throughput, because that flow gets backed up at the constraint.
 
That's uncomfortable for executives who equate busyness with productivity. And it's precisely why the focused diagnostic approach we recommend produces results where broad improvement initiatives often don't.
 
Employee-Involved Change Leadership
 
The fourth practice we recommend to strengthen processes for scalability, employee-involved change leadership, is not explicit in The Goal. Goldratt himself acknowledged this later, writing in his follow-up book What Is This Thing Called the Theory of Constraints that The Goal "highlighted but certainly did not address the major problem of changing the nature of a company."
 
Goldratt does however show operators participating in improvements and uses the “people support what they help to create” dynamic implicitly, having the main characters work with their people to find solutions to their problems, thereby securing their commitment to the changes.

If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.