Jean Cunningham Consulting

Jean Cunningham Consulting, call 224-688-3504.

I am passionate about raising productivity throughout an organization. As successful businesses has proven over the past decade, higher productivity and growth are the easiest and most effective means to enhance the bottom line--net profit.

In the early 90s, this passion led me to seeking out and then diving into the lean manufacturing environment being created at my company. I couldn't understand why these same lean concepts had not been applied to other parts of the company. Over several years as CFO, I used kaizen continuous improvement events to create lean processes within the departments I managed including accounting, IT, and HR. I also managed a conversion to a lean accounting environment with optimized information systems throughout the company to support lean manufacturing. These efforts effected every process and employee in the company and were wonderfully successful for both the employees and the company's bottom line. Once the continuous improvement processes were fully integrated into the departmental culture, ongoing productivity gains occurred as a matter of course.

Every company has unrecognized opportunities in all functions. A lot of them! If they haven't been conducting a company-wide kaizen-based program--manufacturing and everywhere else--for several years, then, they are wasting a significant percentage of their potential net profit in process waste.

This is not to lay blame on employees, managers, or executives. Like many other business processes learned in college, training programs, or the school of hard knocks, maximizing productivity is not something innately understood or recognized. But once a system is in place and part of the ongoing change-culture of a company, productivity gains will continue forever.