Business Issue

North America’s largest provider of integrated dry bulk logistics solutions for the chemical and plastic industries faced significant challenges. As they aimed to expand their transportation infrastructure and value-added warehouse facilities, an impending ownership transition from private equity created pressure to rapidly turn around their export business within three months. Leadership needed to achieve optimal business valuation while maintaining performance across other divisions. Meeting these high-stakes expectations necessitated a consistent, fluid, and robust approach to aligning priorities and executing the strategy.

Approach

To address these challenges, we were hired to transform the organization’s culture and operating rhythms in support of strategic and operational objectives. Our approach included:

1. Aligned Goals and Priorities: Conducted meetings with leaders to identify and align around goals and priorities.
2. Collaborative Work Sessions: Led work sessions to determine metrics, KPIs, and targets (i.e., “definitions of success”) for each goal/priority.
3. Development of Dashboards: Developed dashboards/tools and supporting data capture processes and infrastructure to enable daily, weekly, and monthly measurement/tracking.
4. Stakeholder Engagement: Met with key stakeholders to understand booking processes and identify known gaps.
5. Detailed Process Mapping: Conducted detailed process mapping to understand step-by-step or click-by-click procedures and interactions with technology, systems, tools/machines, people, data/information, and documentation.
6. Data Gathering: Gathered data on processes from systems (e.g., process mining), subject matter experts, and customer interviews.
7. Design and Stress Testing of Changes: Designed changes and conducted stress testing before implementation.

Business Impact

Through a structured and comprehensive approach, we helped boost the organization’s culture and operational rhythms by focusing on multiple key areas:

• Improved Alignment and Focus: Immediate improvement in alignment and focus on key business priorities by helping to identify and align around key business, functional, and team goals and objectives.
• Appropriate Benchmarking: Ensured metric targets related to cost, speed, quality, safety, and timeliness were appropriately benchmarked to industry peers.
• Successful Goal Setting: Supported the goal-setting process to set up for success in the following year.
• Enhanced Business Processes: Enhanced key business processes in the Export business by identifying and characterizing gaps to be closed and recommending changes in process design, decision-making, or more effective provision of data/information.