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Hi, my name is Ben Hankinson, principal consultant with Unity Solutions, and today we're gonna talk about a common question that I get quite often, which is, what does Unity Solutions do that differentiates us from other consulting firms? What we do in a facility during a performance improvement engagement varies depending on what's going on in the facility.

For instance, the facility might not have standard work developed. They might not have a good lean culture. They might not have a lean management system. Uh, they might not not have any management system if they're not, uh, if they're not lean. So it really depends on what's going on within the facility.

During our first couple weeks of an engagement, that's really what we're doing is gauging, well, what, what is the baseline? And we're comparing that baseline against benchmarks that are standards within the industry. But in general, our process that we do in any given facility, regardless of what the specific issues are, is we really focus on connecting the people within your organization.

So this is the people on the floor, this is your leads, your supervisors, your managers, um, your departments, your various supporting departments, operations. We really wanna work to connect that those people to your management system or to your operating system. So that might be a lean management system.

That might be a hybrid management system that might consist of some six Sigma stuff, some lean stuff. It might have some TPM or some agile in there. It really depends on what your specific organization already has. If there's an absence, then we'll also help develop that as well. But primarily our focus as Unity Solutions is unifying the people to your process, because really the people and their ability to execute within that management system is gonna determine success or failure.

With your day-to-day operations, so as a change agent in your facility, what I primarily focus on when we're really trying to connect the people to the process, um, is we do bottom, bottom up change. So typically, an organization will, will want to do change and we do top down and the people on the bottom are basically left hanging and uh, told, "Hey, you guys are gonna adopt some change now."

There's a lot of hesitation to that, in general. And as a result, it can take up to two to three years to really turn a culture. Um, with, with our approach, we're able to do it a lot faster. So our approach, um, we stand by our, our ability to, to turn and change a culture within 18 weeks. And we do that by literally talking to every single individual, and engaging with every single individual on the bottom and making that change happen from a bottom up rather than a top down.

So we, we really work, uh, day to day, developing, say standard work, visual processes, anything that would, would really make up a lean manufacturing,  management system. Um, we really want the hourly employees, the operators, the technicians. We really want them to own that and be a, be a part.

An integral part of building that where then the supervisors are also participating in that. But primarily, it's really a bottom up change process. And that really allows it to the, the adoption of that within the culture to the expedited quite, quite substantially. Because they feel that ownership and when they feel that ownership, their desire to, to get on board with it, uh, is, is we find to be a lot more successful.