We've Moved!

We've moved the active blog to http://kennethdonaldassociates.blogspot.com/

This blog was used as a test to get started

Welcome - Management Consulting

Kenneth Donald & Associates provides management consulting services specializing in operations excellence. We focus on the key areas of lean production, supplier management, continuous improvement, business systems and information technology solutions.

Why hire a consultant? Well the reasons are many...

• Internal resources may be maxed out on day to day issues
• A fresh, objective assessment may be required to tackle a recurring issue
• A new project may require expertise not available internally
• Organizational change may be needed, but internal inertia is making change difficult or impossible

... and the list can go on almost indefinitely.

Businesses are also challenged to keep pace with technology. Almost all firms today use email, maybe there's a website and many companies mid-sized and up have enterprise applications software such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM). Fundamental questions of security, appropriate use and upgrade needs need to be regularly addressed. If an enterprise application such as ERP has been installed for a while i.e. more than 3 years, the company's practices are likely to have changed, but the system may not have been reconfigured to reflect those changes. The most prevalent symptom of this common problem can be found in the comment that "the system doesn't work".

These gaps between actual practice and system configuration creep up without management and users being conscious of the diminishing system performance. An independent assessment not only identifies the problems, but also keeps the organization focussed on resolving those problems and avoid being distracted by the other "bells and whistles" in the software.

Calling on outside expert help is often less expensive in the long term.

This is the first blog entry and in the coming weeks and months I'll comment on a wide variety of business interests, technology applications or trends. Stay tuned.

KD

www.kdonaldassociates.ca