Successful businesses have a plan for improving their operations. Any effective improvement plans build off of the current situation. The better you understand your current situation, the better the plan will be. That's the main goal of our operations assessment: a detailed understanding of your present day operations.

The Allegro team will provide you with a detailed look at how your operations are performing - not how people think they are performing. At the same time, we involve your staff in every step of the process insuring we also include the difficulties or subtleties of your business. We use a three-phase process to accomplish this objective.

Phase One: The data collection. The operations assessment is a data driven process. It works best if all the data is collected prior to the assessment. Rather than 'camp out' for weeks at your site gathering data, Allegro relies on your team to assist with the process. We provide up front training for the team so people know what they are looking for and why. We also use a significant amount of data templates to keep the data consistent and to minimize the risk of data omission.

Phase Two: The assessment week. This is the week where Allegro team members, working side by side with your staff, analyze the data. We will be studying a vast spectrum of data to determine the root causes for late shipments, poor quality, low morale, high costs, etc. Phase Two typically uncovers a significant number of opportunities; more opportunities that you can hope to address. That brings you to Phase Three.

Phase Three: Prioritization. As your team is going through the assessment process, they are beginning to understand how your operational problems are related. For instance the cause of a quality problem may also be driving longer cycle time. By looking at the interactions of these causes, we are looking for the causes that will give us leverage. Leverage means we fix one cause, but improve more than one symptom. The output of Phase Three is the prioritized plan of attack.

copyright 2003 Allegro Manufacturing Consultants, Inc.