Assessments
Before you can go to where you want your business to be, you need an accurate assessment of where you are. CMC's team uses a variety of tools depending on your needs.

We have baseline assessments to ascertain where your company is with lean manufacturing, quality management, supply chain management, business information systems, and compliance with employment rules and regulations. Gap analyses will show you where you are in comparison to where you should be.

The Edge, Enterprise Wide Assessment and Competitiveness Reviews examine your entire company.

And a Value Stream Map graphically shows the current as well as ideal state for everything from a single process or product to your entire company.

Baseline Assessments
Baseline assessments can be done for a product, a process, or a department. The assessments take a present snapshot of the company. CMC's experts use these baseline assessments as a starting point to help you along the road to improved performance.

HR Assessment

• CMC's HR Assessment will give you an objective review of your current human resources policies and procedures as well as recommend changes to correct deficiencies or make improvements. Specifically our HR Assessment focuses on:
• State and federal HR compliance requirements,
• A benchmark with best practices,
• How to develop, improve and maintain a solid HR program,
• A strategic HR plan, and
• An annual follow-up.

Business Needs Analysis
The first step in considering an upgrade or new enterprise system software is a business needs analysis. This analysis looks at how well your current system will meet new requirements, tests how well software currently on the market will accomplish your priorities, and articulates your enterprise software strategy.

Gap Analysis
When there is a lag between where you want the company to be and where it is, CMC's specialists will do a gap analysis. This enables them to better position you for where you want to be in the future.

Enterprise Assessments
The Edge
Taking CMC's Edge assessment was intensive and a little intimidating for Hedman Company Chief Operating Officer James Kelley but ultimately worth it if the 90-year old manufacturer of document processing equipment wanted to remain competitive. The Edge asks top management approximately 40 key questions designed to ferret out weak spots in a company's processes, procedures and policies.

The questions the Edge posed were not ones Hedman management had thought about seriously, according to Kelley. The mere act of asking the questions encouraged the company to more intensely focus its attention on marketing and the competition. "Before the assessment benchmarking was not even on the front burner," says Kelly.

Enterprise Wide Assessment
The pressure is on to produce "better, faster, cheaper" if you are to successfully compete in a global arena. It's difficult to do that unless you take a look at the entire company. That's the approach CMC's specialists take with the Enterprise Wide Assessment. They look at the entire enterprise across department lines from the plant floor to the front office, from sales and marketing to engineering. Our experts analyze every action and interaction up and down the supply chain, inside the company and out, from materials to information flow to people. This in-depth, all-encompassing approach helps our consultants see solutions others may miss.

Value Stream Map
Value stream Maps help you understand where you are now, where you want to go and in what priority those changes should occur.

Value Stream Mapping for a product focuses on one family. The Current State Map gives yo a clear picture of the flow of materials and information from raw material in the door, through the manufacturing process, and out the door as finished goods. From there you can identify lean tools and techniques to help you improve flow and eliminate waste. The Current State Map shows you how to incorporate the tools and techniques for improved flow.

For example, an industrial and machinery equipment company used VSM to plan its lean implementation. So far the lean plan has helped reduce operating overhead 25 percent, increase throughput 50 percent and save a projected $32,000 in paperwork each year.

You can also do Value Stream Mapping for an entire company. Similar to the value stream maps you would do for a specific family of products or processes, CMC's team can expand the scope to include the entire company. The map looks at the following systems as they currently are with an eye toward identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

• Corporate culture,
• The interconnections and dependencies within departments,
• Communications methods,
• Software and information technology,
• Production processes,
• Accounts receivable/accounts payable,
• Pricing,
• Order entry, and
• New product development.

From there CMC's team recommends what it will take for you to:

• Achieve your goals with an eye toward saving time and money,
• Identify unfulfilled customer needs,
• Create opportunities for niche monopolies, and
• Uncover other competitive positions.