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Manufacturing

Talk With Kotter

Enabling Organizations to Be Efficient and Innovative.

As manufacturing companies continue to grapple with ongoing supply chain disruptions, forces of globalization and localization, labor shortages, and technology changes, incremental improvements fall short of delivering the transformative change needed to thrive and compete in a crowded marketplace.

From our research and experience in leading large-scale change, we know that the greatest untapped potential in most organizations is the capacity of their employees. By empowering more leadership at every level in the organization, we work with clients to drive accelerated impact to address today’s challenges while building capability to respond swiftly to the uncertainty of the future.

Our Unique Approach

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Hard to Imagine Results

Our approach delivers hard-to-imagine gains in productivity and innovation by engaging all employees in contributing new ideas and making them a reality.

Aligning Around a Shared Opportunity

With manufacturing facilities located across the world and functionally siloed, it is even more important for manufacturing businesses to be aligned around shared opportunities and goals.

Agility without sacrificing reliability

Reliability and efficiency are the bedrock of any manufacturing business, agility and innovation must be additive and not in opposition to this consistent performance.

Celebrating wins to build momentum

Kotter supports clients in building a robust strategy for identifying tangible wins that result from new actions and behaviors and promoting their success to a wide audience to reinforce changes and generate momentum.

Peer-to-peer engagement

Kotter’s work promotes a peer-to-peer strategy that connects unions, management, and all employees and encourages information from the most trusted sources and open dialogue amongst peers.

Manufacturing Focus Areas

We work with Manufacturing clients to accelerate the realization of their goals including:

1

Supply Chain Transformation

Whether digitalization, rationalization, or operational improvement by orienting employees around a compelling opportunity and empowering and engaging more people across the organization, Kotter helps our clients achieve transformation at unprecedented speed and scale. With more ideas and an enhanced execution muscle, our work bridges the gap between strategy and high-impact business results.
2

Customer Centricity

Illuminating line of sight to customer needs particularly in an environment of channel disintermediation, our outside-in approach engages a broad employee base to respond to rapidly shifting consumer behavior by aligning new behaviors, structures, processes, and systems around a clear view of customer value as the ultimate outcome.
3

Digital Transformation

Automation and digitalization in the manufacturing space are often met with resistance and fear. Many investments in new technology fall short because this resistance leads to inadequate adoption of the new tools. By engaging the entire organization in the change process, Kotter helps clients create a movement of empowered employees who not only ensure successful adoption, but also accelerate the value and impact of technology implementation.
4

Enabling More Innovation and Greater Speed-to-Market

The key to greater innovation in an environment of change and uncertainty is the activation of more leadership. By removing structural, process, and policy barriers, and by engaging beyond the usual suspects, Kotter enables teams to move with urgency, agility, and creativity. These efforts are further enhanced by developing management systems that are adapted to the speed and agility required for success in the 21st century.
5

M&A Integration

Led by an early and intentional focus on culture as an enabler of the desired business outcome, Kotter engages legacy organizations to align around the promise of what is possible as a new entity, reinforcing new cultural norms to support an accelerated speed-to-value realization and reduce lags in productivity.
6

Culture Transformation

The link between culture and business performance has been well established through research going back almost half a century. High performance requires cultures that are a fit to the current strategy, and most importantly are adaptable to changes in the environment. Evolving culture is exceptionally difficult when it is strong – as is often the case in manufacturing. Our approach starts with actions and behaviors that deliver better results, which – when recognized and reinforced – form new habits and eventually an evolved culture.

Featured Resources + Insights

Areas of Expertise

While not an all-inclusive list, the strategies below represent the most common situations our clients face.

01. Strategy Execution

Mobilize people throughout the organization to break down barriers, solve problems, and inspire innovation.

02. Leadership Development

Provide the breadth and depth necessary to advance change capabilities up, down, and across organizations in a sustainable and scalable way.

03. CULTURE CHANGE

Drive intentional culture change that starts with new actions, generates better results, and eventually produces an evolved culture.

04. OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY

Engage employees to uncover new ideas and the capacity to lead, innovate, and drive value for the customer and the business as a whole.

05. Merger + Acquisitions

Move the “how” of M&A integration to the top of the priority list – right next to the “what” – focus first on culture and people.

06. Digital Technology Transformation

Increase engagement, transparency, and excitement for the new technology to deliver the desired business impact.
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