What we are

An organizational development and organizational effectiveness consulting firm that uses both technical and behavioral methods to resolve business needs. We help frame an issue and establish implementation plans, skills, and needed participation effectively solve or prevent problems. We bring in specialized skills from other firms as necessary to assure full service consulting.

Who we serve

In the history of RIS Consulting, the individual who reached out for our assistance has included such varied roles as CEO, COO, VP of Quality, VP of Human Resources, Site General Manager, and holding company executives. Executives with responsibility to address significant issues or initiatives.

The industries we have served include technology, consumer products, pharmaceutical companies, but we have also worked with such diverse areas as agriculture and marine automation. The industries and cultures vary, the typology of problems remains fairly consistent.

What kinds of issues?

Client issues are both proactive and problem solving. Proactive needs include requests to put into place management skills and processes to assure a smooth planned growth, or to review and upgrade management skills and practices in anticipation of increased competition. Proactive requests include help in maintaining a cost reduction trend when all apparent waste has been wrung out of the system or to figure out how to improve quality indicators when they look near perfect already.

Problem-solving requests of RIS are to diagnose and help resolve issues such as:

A technology company: It looks like our lifetime product warranty costs will exceed profit margins
A consumer products company: Our new product launch time lags competition in a field where first to market is important.
An investment manager is finding that his investment discipline is not yielding the same performance pattern that it should. After two expensive engagements with sophisticated investment consultants yielded no insight, RIS was called to look at the firm.
A service business: We are implementing an enterprise system and it's not going well. We can't tell if it's the software, the implementation plan, or the people.
Pharmaceutical company needs to align R&D with emerging market trends and needs to define just how to get started.

The commonality among these requests are that the need is not purely technical engineering problems, but are operational issues that involve people, process, sometimes change management, and often times a strategy that needs better execution.

What kinds of results

The results are often not just the delivery of the requested outcomes; they often include a reframing of the issue to make solutions more apparent.

In the case of the technology company that could not get its manufacturing quality in line, the consulting engagement resulted in adoption of new metrics, including Ò% right first timeÓ, and a shedding of cost and quality problems from its operations. The warranty costs did fall precipitously. The root cause analysis, however, pointed strongly to executive-led cultural drivers that were disruptive of good manufacturing discipline. The company's core competence did not include manufacturing and a better path was to partner with a high-quality manufacturing partner, and focus on what the company needed to do to stay differentiated. Moving the manufacturing to a partner company necessitated greater discipline in design for manufacturability, and resulted in further cost and quality improvements.

In the case of the plant with the goal of shedding costs, even though all waste had been eliminated, an annual facilitated diagnostic process was established, based on the Baldrige criteria. The results fed the annual improvement plan, targeting the areas that the data indicated could be made more efficient. A high-involvement process improvement cycle was established that found and eliminated cost and also gained enthusiastic employee participation. The improvements from this planning process could not have been obtained by management alone, as they were so embedded within low level work processes that they could only have been detected and address by those doing the process.

For the investment advisor who could not understand the performance drop from a consistent investment discipline, the answer was not a purely technical one. The performance pattern was analyzed and found to reveal evidence of behavioral patterns. In fact, two patterns were embedded in the performance trend, one indicating second-guessing and the other indicated a change in decision-bias. Researching the actual behavior of the investment team, the sources of the problem were confirmed and as mundane as the structure of the agenda of the investment meeting and separating mentoring assignments from investment decisions. Sometimes what appears to be a technical problem isn't.

The results from RIS Consulting projects are typically