Do You Qualify?

Is This Opportunity for You?

Is our approach … based on the Theory of Constraints … For You?

The basic criteria for taking advantage of this opportunity for business performance improvement are simple … it does not matter whether you have $2MM or $100MM in sales, whether you make to stock or to order, or engineer to order, with heavy customization or none, or even operating as a pure job shop that never makes the same things twice.

It does not matter whether your employees are “old dogs” or a new generation, what language they speak or their level of education. It doesn’t matter whether you have a modern computer system or a basic one or none; and it doesn’t matter whether your data is accurate or not. Or, whether your industry is labor intensive or capital intensive; or your market’s on an upswing or a downturn.

This approach to performance and profit improvement will work, regardless.

But the Theory of Constraints isn’t for everyone.

What follow are the real criteria that determine whether this opportunity is for you, or not.


Are the owners and CEO willing to follow their own thinking, even if it bucks the direction of the herd?

The reality is that when it comes to business improvement technologies and techniques most owners and managers are most comfortable when they’re following the herd – and if that’s you, you need to think twice about our services because what we do is different.

Our approach to performance improvement, while proven over 30 years and used by major corporations world-wide and by organizations such as NASA and the US Marine Corp, is unconventional. You’ll out-perform the herd, even the best of the herd – but you will not be doing exactly what they do. (In fact, this is an element of how you maintain your edge; you always know what the herd are doing, and you can choose to get there by a faster, more direct route.)

Now, before you commit we’ll provide you with all the up-front information and education you need to make a good decision, and we’ll conduct a thorough and detailed Assessment to show you exactly how the opportunity will work for your specific company, products, resources, and markets.

There’s no “just trust us” in this process, it’s all laid out. Including obstacles, and potential negative side-effects, and suggestions as to their resolution.

And it will all make sense to you. That’s a promise. But the time will come when you have to choose between doing what makes sense to you, or going with the herd.


What’s the Goal of the owners and the CEO?

Is it clear-cut that sales and profit growth are major elements in the owner’s and CEO’s plans? If you’d rather consolidate than grow, if your instincts are to remain at the current size and become more profitable by attacking all sources of costs … then we don’t have a good fit. That’s a valid approach to profit improvement but it isn’t ours.

Our approach is to START (there’s a lot more to come) by helping you get best-in-class with lead times and on-time delivery and simultaneously expose 20% to 40% more capacity in your existing resources – and do it in a hurry – and then to sell it for full (or even premium) price by capitalizing on that serious competitive edge. A lucrative Big Bang impact.

Now, we’ll probably help you cut costs along the way almost as a side-effect – for example, greatly reducing overtime and typically scrap, too – but the cost-cutting isn’t the focus.

This combination of performance improvement is “the gift that keeps on giving.” Your competitive edge won’t be matched even by companies seriously implementing stand-alone Lean Manufacturing (and most that claim to be serious, aren’t) or even Lean Six Sigma, and certainly not by competitors buying new computer systems in the hope of improving performance. And the techniques will provide a consistent boost in productivity over conventional techniques for as long as you maintain them. And that may be enough for you.

However, with the added profit from that tactic safely banked, we can also work with you to construct a strategy to generate and maintain aggressive and profitable sales growth. Now, some companies don’t want this – even when the opportunity is clear. They are happy to simply bank the easy profits and to know that the competitive edge they have will help them grow at a respectable rate without being aggressive. And that’s fine. But if you want to go for the home-run, we can help with that.

What we do not want to be involved with is a situation where we expose the surplus capacity (without slave-driving, without any threats to quality and most importantly of all – without any threat to safety) and it simply leads to lay-offs. While lay-offs are sometimes necessary to enable a company to survive, and to protect other jobs, this isn’t the case here – the opportunity is to capitalize on the implementation by converting the added productivity into added sales. The impact on profits is far, far greater through this channel. That’s what gives us our adrenalin “fix.”

A common obstacle to this is that a company isn’t sure of how to increase sales. That’s OK … we can use the Theory of Constraints to deal with that obstacle to performance improvement, too.


Are the CEO and the management team willing to execute? Action-oriented?

The good news about our approach is that you can do a poor job of it and still reap a pay-off, often in just weeks, that is larger than you’d gain in years from doing a superb job with any other approach. But the management team has to have an inclination towards action, rather than spectating.

We (Synchronix) are not scared of rolling up our sleeves and getting stuck in … it’s not unusual for us to have lock-up privileges in some client companies because we’re the last people out, and it’s not unusual to see us turning up at midnight to observe a shift change-over, for example, and we often end-up helping with nitty-gritty details of implementation – but YOU have to execute.

For example, where the system highlights that a job should be released to the shop at a certain date, and it hasn’t been, and this non-performance is highlighted … we expect someone to follow-up and address the problem.

These should be routine procedures for someone … both the action (that wasn’t taken), and the follow-up, AND the subsequent analysis into “what was the problem?” Was the material not available (in which case, why was it released – procedure check, and change if necessary)? Was there insufficient capacity at the gating operation? (Follow through.) Or was there inadequate training of the person responsible for the release? (Follow through.) Or … etc.

The system is elegant, and very effective, and typically earns a 95% or better “buy-in” from employees in all departments, at all levels – but someone still has to execute.


Finally: Are you willing to expose and slaughter some sacred cows?

More than any other business improvement technology, our approach highlights the sacred cows that are embedded in an organization’s thinking and it’s policies and procedures.

Of course, the good news is that this is where the power of our approach lies – by challenging the way things have always been. But some owners and managers have a great deal of ego tied-up in the way things are, and are reluctant to see sacred cows exposed. Some of the sacred cows we expose are, to be blunt, stunning for most managers. Owners and managers who see the opportunity created by their new understanding can cash-in; those who are threatened by it, will experience status quo.

So … do you qualify? Are you interested?


Interested? Then take the easy next steps.

1. Sign-up now to receive our monthly newsletter, “Inside Edge on Improvement” – where we’ll explain some of the “Insider’s” perspectives, tips and techniques that make an enormous different to the success of your performance improvement efforts.

There’s gold in every edition; we give away “secrets” in these newsletters that not 1 manufacturer in 100 knows. And I’m not trying to hype this up; these literally ARE secrets, in terms of … most manufacturers simply have no awareness of them whatsoever.

2. Schedule a (free) 15-minute phone call. Click the link, give us 2 possible dates and times when we can reach you, we’ll confirm by email, and … let’s talk.

3. Consider inviting us to deliver a 1/2-Day Introduction to Theory of Constraints Session on-site … or to conduct 1-day “First Assessment.”

The 1/2-day session is stunning, and typically rocks managers back on their heels with some of the immediate insights they gain into cause-effect impacts in their business.

And the First Assessment, while only one day, is powerful.

In a single day of visiting your operation and talking to a few managers on-site, we can give you a solid, rational and fully justified sense of the nature and the scale of the opportunity in YOUR organization, the most obvious sacred cows and some of their implications on your performance, the type of improvement you should expect, the general direction of how you could get there from here, and our recommendation for your most sensible next step – should you choose to take one.

Incidentally, my partner and I – with a combined 60 years of industrial experience do all the work ourselves. Assessments, education, implementation.

No juniors.

And yes … several more steps down the road, if you see that a clear-cut opportunity for massive, sustainable improvement is PROVEN to your management team’s satisfaction, and if you choose to discuss the option of us working with you to turn it into reality … we will certainly consider linking a significant portion of our compensation, to your results. If our approach is as powerful and effective as we claim, why wouldn’t we?

And, offer you terms that give you the potential for a positive cash flow from your improvements while the project itself is still “live.”

So … sign-up now. And schedule that call. It’ll only take you 2 minutes.