Practical Insights (Blog)

Making sales and operations planning (S&OP) work

Many organizations struggle to forecast client demand and align their operations to respond accordingly. Maine Pointe’s procurement, operations and logistics practice leaders outline five critical success factors that will ensure effective demand-driven sales and operations planning (S&OP).

How working collaboratively with the unions helped set a corporate record for productivity

In part two of his three-part blog exploring the increasingly complex relationship between management and unions, Jim Mynaugh, Senior Delivery Advisor at Maine Pointe discusses the breakthrough results executives can achieve by working in partnership with the unions.

It isn't always the unions' fault

In part one of his three part blog exploring the increasingly complex relationship between management and unions, Jim Mynaugh, Senior Delivery Advisor at Maine Pointe purports that, while it may be easy for managers to lay the blame for operational problems at the unions’ door, managers can often be wrong.

The golf cart story

Jim Mynaugh, Senior Delivery Advisor, explains how cycle time reduction improves speed, unlocks profit, enables growth, and argues that being 'good' is not 'good enough' anymore. 

Over the past 10-15 years, many manufacturing plants have gone through repeated cycles of budget cuts. Organizational layers have been chopped, headcounts reduced and entire factories have been outsourced to countries with lower labor costs. 

Companies that effectively manage their quality culture stand to gain a competitive edge yet, in our experience, many organizations are still not viewing quality as a cross-organizational issue. To embed a quality culture, an organization must first understand what quality is in their industry before developing a Quality Management Operating System that matches their specific environment and takes full advantage of the potential of their talent.