Operational Effectiveness

When you market your products and/or services you make a promise to your customers about the value you will deliver. The effectiveness of your operation determines how well you keep that promise. Simply put, your organization’s ability to develop and maintain the operational capabilities necessary to deliver your customers’ desired value is your competitive advantage.

With such a direct link between operational effectiveness and overall business success the task of clearly identifying the capabilities you simply must have and the internal processes most critical to achieving them are top priorities. Once identified, the ability to monitor the performance of those key operational functions on a real time basis (or as close to it as possible) becomes mission critical for managers as they work to direct the daily activities of their people.


Performance Measurement and Accountability

Trying to improve business performance? It's a difficult task if you are not measuring the right elements of your business and holding managers accountable for delivering results. In fact, our experience has proven that you can't manage what you don't measure. Performance measurements act as scoreboards for your business showing you and your people how you're doing, where to improve, and best of all, when you're succeeding. We can help you identify the critical behaviors and process attributes you need to be tracking and create methods to help you do it.


Process Improvement and Redesign

The work of every business is accomplished through a system of processes. From purchasing and sales to billing and inventory there are defined actions taken by people and machines to complete the job. How well these processes perform individually and as an integrated whole determines the business' ability to deliver its promised value to the its customers.

Palmer & Associates approaches process improvement in three ways. First, we help our clients better understand what is currently taking place within their business and identify opportunities for improvement. Second, we put the business processes in context with the business strategy in order to prioritize their importance in delivering the value promises you've made to your customers. This allows us to quickly identify the low hanging fruit and focus our energy on the areas that will yield the greatest return. Third, we provide our clients a broad perspective of how the various processes tie together to create a system focused on achieving your strategic objectives.

Palmer & Associates has worked with clients from manufacturers and retailers to professional service firms to improve their operations by increasing efficiency, tightening quality control, and raising productivity.


Financial Decision-Making and Controls

We all wish that we had a clearer picture of tomorrow so that we could make better decisions today, but many business managers struggle to apply the concept of projecting the future based on past performance to financial decision-making. Due to ineffective information systems, lack of training, or lack of time, managers often find themselves looking backward at historical financial data showing them where they have been, rather than where they are going. This backward view of the business often creates a disconnect between daily decisions and financial results, and can result in a managerial culture that spends more time reacting than proactively managing.

Working with the accounting systems already in place we develop financial tracking tools designed to present historical information in a straightforward way and project the future financial outcomes of operational decisions. Managers with and without strong accounting backgrounds are using tools we've developed to successfully identify the key business activities that drive costs within their operations. They are creating scoreboards that focus their entire team on the controllable behaviors that will ensure success and are gaining the ability to manage costs, forecast profits and cash flow, make informed decisions, and manage proactively.