Mission Critical?

One of the things I most enjoyed about my career in management consulting was the constant stream of insights I gained into areas of business and industry of which I had no prior knowledge. For most of my time, my consulting practice was focused on operational improvements but occasionally we discovered things that had a strategic impact.

One such assignment was carried out for a company whose business was the repair and maintenance of lifts - elevators to my transAtlantic friends. They were in receipt of a constant barrage of complaints about the speed and cost of their services although they were putting huge effort into both. One of the things we did as part of our practice was to hold what we called Painstorming Groups, where members of various parts of the stakeholder population were invited to share the problems they experienced. This led to a survey to prioritise them which then enabled us to recommend and lead a process for improvement.

The client's customers were from all parts of commerce and industry from factories, offices, hotels and hospitals, and we organised the painstorming groups to consist of members of similar sized organisations. The group that I most remember consisted of facilities managers from large sites, and two contributors stand out. The first was from a car assembly plant - he explained that the line was on the ground floor and the stores on the first. Each line had its own lift so that, if the lift broke down, the line had to be stopped. The second was from a large acute hospital. They had two theatre lifts serving six theatres; if a lift broke down, three theatres couldn't receive any patients which cost the hospital £1000 an hour for each theatre.

To cut a long story short, the project led us to realise that there were two kinds of customers - those who wanted their lifts repaired quickly and cheaply when they failed and those who couldn't tolerate a failure under any circumstances. Members of the second group were not price sensitive.

The client reorganised his business to deliver these two different services; service engineers were often based at the sites with low failure tolerance.

OK, this all seems pretty obvious now but at the time it was seen as a breakthrough.