PPI is committed to leveraging our industry acumen, operational expertise and formal research projects to help our clients improve performance. Outlined below is information that will help companies further their understanding of business improvement in various settings necessary to increasing corporate performance. Click on the titles to view the complete white papers.
Why Do Process Improvement Efforts Fail?
A major process improvement initiative can represent a significant investment of organizational effort and resources. Every project and every organization is unique; but the causes of project failure are not. By understanding some of the common reasons improvement efforts fail to deliver the promised results, you can protect against those traps and improve the odds of your project's success.
Dealing with Change Resistance
Resistance to change has many causes. When it comes from technical issues, like a lack of skills or resources, addressing those sources can eliminate much resistance. When the problem is rooted in political and cultural issues, however, it is harder to deal with. The social and emotional sources of resistance can be difficult to identify and manage. This white paper presents some practical tips that can help you understand and overcome this challenging problem.
Marketing Trends for Today: New Media to Reach Customers Better
In today's communication ecology, new channels have become critically important to connect interactively with customers who may no longer be receptive to traditional marketing styles. Marketing approaches incorporating social media and mobile interactivity pose new challenges to organizations, but also rich opportunities and access to new sources of data to help you design and target effective marketing efforts.
How Does Your Marketing Organization Measure Up to the Pace of Change?
The rapid pace of change in technology and media poses a real challenge to marketing organizations. Social media and mobile apps allow organizations to connect interactively with customers in new ways that can produce significant returns, but these new approaches can also disrupt processes and organizational structures that were never designed to support them. Does your organization have what it needs to take advantage of this technological shift?
Why Resist Change?
No matter how important or necessary change is, or how trivial, some people in your organization are going to resist it. In order to overcome their resistance, it's important to understand the causes. And resistance is not necessarily the enemy - it can be useful, if you are able to manage it constructively.
Top Trends & Concerns in Property & Casualty Insurance
P & C organizations are facing an urgent need to improve their business operations to reduce their rising risk exposure and make the most of
the opportunities presented by new technologies and demanding customers. This white paper looks at some of the ways organizations are responding to these challenges.
Five Things That Derail Improvement Projects and One Thing That Always Works
Projects that aim to achieve significant business improvement can be highly complex and difficult, and all too often they fail to produce the intended benefits.This white paper profiles some common ways that projects go wrong, and one approach that can help lay the foundation for success.
Current Issues in Pharmaceutical Sales
Economic uncertainty, regulatory change, and the end of the blockbuster era make it necessary for pharmaceutical sales organizations to step outside their established comfort zones. But there are new tools and approaches that promise strong results for the organization that embraces them. This white paper examines some of the most exciting developments in the field.
Scaling Up Your Project Toolkit: Communication for Big Projects
The tools and techniques you use to keep a small project under control are not necessarily going to be effective when you are dealing with a major initiative that involves a lot of stakeholders and competing interests from many parts of the organization. An effective communication plan addresses all the players in a project with role-appropriate tools and messages.
Using Metrics to Drive Organization-Wide Performance
Operational measures are key to gaining an actionable perspective on business performance. Utilize the four critical perspectives laid out here to design the measures that can inform effective management and decision-making in your organization.
If You Want to See Your ROI, Build Change Management into Your Project
It's one thing for a project to achieve its technical goals, another thing for it to realize the anticipated business results. If you want to see real ROI from your work, you have to get people to actually change their behavior. That means change management can't be an afterthought. This whitepaper lays out some steps you can take to minimize resistance and improve results through a well-designed change program.
Productivity Gains are Unique to You
How well do your Cost Savings Initiatives fit your organization? A critical component of any process improvement effort is recognition that one size does not fit all. Understanding your organization's process improvement maturity level and aligning your cost savings efforts appropriately is a critical aspect in achieving success.
What Does "Waste" Look Like in Non-Transactional Services?
Elimination of waste, defined as anything that consumes resources without adding value a customer would be willing to pay for, is a central element of the Lean Six Sigma improvement paradigm. Canonical forms of "waste" were initially identified in a manufacturing context, and comparable categories have been extended to transactional services. In non-transactional service organizations there are still plenty of non-value-added activities, but they tend to look a little different. This whitepaper identifies some of the most common forms of non-transactional process waste.
Are Your Organization's Lean Six Sigma Efforts Producing Anticipated Results?
This is a question that many organizations are asking themselves today. Lean Six Sigma's popularity has grown in the services industries over the last few years. However, many CEO's are asking themselves the following questions: Have the methods my organization is using to drive our Lean Six Sigma efforts been effective? What has the result been on our bottom line? Why have we not achieved the anticipated ROI? This summary addresses the common Lean Six Sigma pitfalls to avoid.
Business Transformation: How to Achieve Practical & Achievable Increases in Productivity
Current thinking on how to significantly improve performance through effective business process improvement.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
This summary addresses practical ways to develop an execution oriented culture, to embed behaviors and cultures necessary to turn ideas and plans into meaningful results.
Inside Selling to Get What You Want
How effective are you at persuading others to your side? Most people rely on simply "supporting their argument with facts" and are tactical in nature in building a case. Here are some great tips on how to be more strategic with your persuasion capabilities.
Insurance Industry Trends and Concerns
The insurance industry has always been adept at transforming risk into opportunity. In today's unsettled business climate there are many risks for insurers to manage, and with the need to drive out operational inefficiency a major concern, the risks associated with unnecessary operational costs and cumbersome processes are coming into new focus.
Make Offshore Outsourcing Work for You: Lessons & Approaches
Outsourcing is an obvious solution to many business needs - but is it the right solution for your business right now? This whitepaper reviews some of the situations where outsourcing of various kinds may or may not be appropriate, and some of the things you should consider when determining whether that's the approach that's best for your organization to follow.
Managing Current IT Issues
IT is critical to organizations today, but it can eat up precious resources and provide "solutions" that are poorly implemented and add to problems rather than helping. The success of IT solutions has little to do with technology itself. This white paper examines approaches to making IT an effective team player and unlocking the business value of IT investments.
Using Performance Metrics to Increase Accountability
You manage what you measure: thoughts on how to improve the linkage between business strategy and the metrics used manage business performance and guide decision-making.
Understand Your Way to Buy-In
Achieving agreement may come down to using coercive authority, but did you actually achieve buy-in? Obtaining commitment is crucial to many aspects of keeping up with today's dynamic business environment. Here are some insights into how to increase your ability to affect the behavior of others.
Valuing Your Efforts: ROI and Beyond
How can you demonstrate to your organization that the money spent on a project has been worth it? This whitepaper looks at some of the issues involved in determining the ROI of a training project, and at alternative ways to measure its real value to the organization.
Using Value Alignment for Cost Transformation
Reducing costs has always been a key business priority, but for most programs, the results have been underwhelming. A key challenge is identifying where to focus efforts and how to create a cost transformation program that delivers lasting results. Value Alignment produces meaningful results quickly, while also laying a solid accountability foundation. The approach can be readily sponsored and lead by the CFO as a means of embedding cost containment organization-wide.
The following list represents the cream of the crop in terms of relevant information specific to industry challenges.
- Electronic Banking Trims Hospital Costs
- Health Insurance Focus of Small-Business Concerns
- RFID and Barcodes: You Can (and Should) Use Both
- Use Trigger Events to Find the Ready Customer
- Reducing your dependence on Legacy IT systems
- How to avoid the pitfalls of Six Sigma
- Quantifying Drug Risks & Benefits: Can It Be Done?
