SAI-at-a-Glance

We are SAI Consulting.

Our consulting firm is engaged exclusively in the residential construction value stream (residential development and construction, and building materials industries), on behalf of clients intent on improving operating performance, profitability, and economic return.

We are uniquely qualified to serve our clients’ interests, because we have solved problems and implemented solutions as the senior managers in companies just like theirs. Our knowledge and experience within a specific industry – combined with the depth of our consulting methodology and the choice of approaches we offer in how that consulting is delivered – sets us apart from any and all other consulting firms.

• We focus a distinctive, systems-oriented, constraints-management problem-solving methodology at addressing an individual client’s specific set of operational circumstances.

• We work with clients either under a traditional (fee-for-service) consulting approach or a results-based consulting approach (under which we are compensated solely on the basis of the results that our consulting enables them to achieve, measured in terms of the actual improvements to business outcomes).

• Our public workshops and conferences feature the type of learning that occurs in a situation constructed to replicate the competitive, fast-paced, rapidly-changing, uncertain, risk-laden, variation-filled operating and business environment in which our clients must operate.

Our clients engage us for the following reasons:

• We have a firm grasp of the operational performance issues they face, and we are able to couch our work in terms that they understand.

• We have the ability to focus their efforts to improve operational performance directly on solutions that translate into increased profitability and higher economic return.

• We are the leading experts in our chosen areas of consulting practice, including process management (documentation, analysis, measurement, and redesign), performance compensation and measurement systems, production management systems, and project management and scheduling.

• We are able to synthesize a number of different management tools – including Continuous Process Improvement, Open-Book Management, Lean Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, and Critical Chain Project Management – into customized business solutions.

• We are committed to a different type of consulting and a different type of client-consultant relationship – one defined by results and shared benefits, one fully-conscious of the existing capacity and capability for implementing change, one intent on producing learning that increases internal capacity/capability and lessens dependence on us.

Consulting Approaches and Consulting Services

Our clients engage us under the following consulting arrangements:

• Results-Based Consulting®: Clients engage us as partners in their overall effort to improve operating performance and business outcomes (measured in terms of improvements in profitability, contribution, and return on assets). More of an overall approach to consulting than a type of consulting work, under a Results-Based Consulting® approach, we open the entire SAI toolbox and tailor solutions to meet the specific requirements of each client. Under a Results-Based Consulting® approach, our compensation is based on measurable results.

• Conventional Consulting: Clients engage us under a traditional, fee-for-service arrangement to meet the requirements of specific projects, such as documenting and redesigning their business processes, laying out production systems, and designing team-based performance compensation systems.

Our clients engage us to do the following types of consulting work:

• Current Reality Assessment®: Clients engage us to objectively analyze and assess the reality of their current situation – current operating and business performance, resources, and capabilities – as the first step in a Results-Based Consulting® engagement. A Current Reality Assessment® is an analysis and assessment deeply-rooted in a cause-and-effect
  understanding of problem-solving, of how business systems work, and how they are improved. They establish the baseline for improving operating and business performance.

•  Competitive Assessment Scorecard®: Clients engage us to measure their current operating and business (financial) performance and compare it to previous periods. Competitive Assessment Scorecards® are used as an in-depth scorecard for measuring performance, a comparative (trend) analysis tool, and a root-cause problem-solving tool.

• Business Process Improvement: Clients engage us to document, design, redesign, and then teach them how to manage their operating, business, and value stream (supply chain) processes, in order to eliminate waste and non-value-added steps from the work that they perform. Why? Because business is fundamentally about the value that is created for a specific and narrowly-defined segment of customers, most of which is created and delivered through the manner in which work is performed.  Work is done in processes.

• Production Principles: Clients engage us to build a basic understanding of production systems, production capacity, productivity, inventory, throughput, and cycle time that can be taught to their teammates (managers and employees).

• Business Principles: Clients engage us to build a basic understanding for how operating performance connects to business outcomes, so that teammates (managers and employees) learn to think, care, and act more like business owners. It covers accounting (including variable costing and cost/volume/profit decision-making), financial reporting (including the Contribution Income Statement format).

• Performance Compensation: Clients engage us to design and implement team-based performance compensation systems, focused on a single business measure, with performance measurement and compensation linked in such a way that it enables their managers and employees to function like a team working toward a common goal, not a collection of teammates working toward individual goals.

• Performance Measures and Reporting: Clients engage us to help them design Balanced Scorecard-type data-gathering and reporting systems (dashboards and heads-up displays) based on cause-and-effect relationships between targeted measures of operating and business performance.

• Production Planning and Scheduling: Clients engage us to design and implement production planning/management/scheduling systems, based on the Theory of Constraints, Critical Chain Project Management, and Lean Six Sigma.

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