SERVICES

Supply Chain Fitness Center

Winning the Game with Supply Chain Improvement

To respond to industry changes, your 2007 business plan now calls for lower total costs, stepped-up productivity, and better deal-making in operations and purchasing. Symbius' Supply Chain Fitness Center helps your divisional, regional and national teams take decisive action by providing a unique, accurate snapshot of current conditions and immediate improvement possibilities. We are the only management consulting firm devoted 100% to the production homebuilding industry, from strategy and organization to operations, purchasing and supply chain.

The benefits of the Supply Chain Fitness Center include:

  • Gameplan: Identifying areas of opportunity in purchasing and operations
  • Benchmark: Understanding your performance against industry best practices
  • Decisions: Prioritizing opportunities based on business impact and magnitude of change
  • Plan: Developing a path forward which focuses on quick and mid-term wins
  • Measure: Estimating implementation costs and challenges, and estimating possible dollar and time benefits
  • Take Action: Implementing an action plan for immediate results

What our customers are saying:

"Symbius has been instrumental to our purchasing and supply chain strategy and programs. The incredible progress weƒve made in the past year(s) could not have been accomplished without their guidance, support and expertise." -Scott Hearty, Vice President of National Purchasing Operations, Standard Pacific Homes (Big Builder # 11)

"Symbius has been an invaluable advisor in helping us determine where we are and where we need to go." - Mary Fitzgerald, VP of Purchasing, John Laing Homes (Big Builder # 34)

Overview

To achieve the lowest total cost of production, the best production cycle time for your product/plan mix, and the correct mix of personnel and costs to operate the business, your Purchasing and Construction operations need to be in peak performance shape. Sometimes a few divisions are; sometimes even one region. But we think there are few top 100 homebuilders that truly...

  • Know about and really use Best Practices for purchasing and operations across the entire organization
  • Have the capabilities to strike the best deals in good and bad times, while still forging solid trade and supplier relations
  • Know their cost structure in order to understand trade-offs between divisional, regional and national programs
  • Develop their people into solid leaders, managers and front-line performers to operate with the best mix of skills
  • Apply leading supply chain practices to achieve business objectives

Leading homebuilders can use the Symbius Supply Chain Fitness Center as a resource to help consistently win the game in Purchasing and Construction operations. Take your company's supply chain wellness to new peak levels utilizing our methodology of:

  • Rapid returns: use of our standardized templates and tools enables diagnosis of purchasing and operations processes in a fast, cost-effective way
  • A common fact base: build consensus through a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the business model based on actual data
  • Understanding of the impact: establish specific strategies, and quantify the ROI impact, around relevant improvement options
  • An improvement "compass": provide the foundation for supply chain improvement initiatives, and establish direction to kick start those initiatives with change/implementation programs

Methodology

Our Fitness Center methodology is constructed atop four proprietary tools that help us rapidly assess your company operations so we may help you drive immediate results:

  • Interview Guide with more than 250 structured questions comparing existing operations in key focus areas against industry best standards
  • Statistical Data Templates to gather numerical data in a format which is easy to complete by the appropriate staff in finance and operations
  • Best Practices Database to benchmark the supply chain operations
  • GroupSystems® collaboration software to collect the appropriate data from executives, managers and staff in a quick and insightful manner, and to encourage intense collaboration for new answers

Demonstrated Results

Clients win with the Symbius Supply Chain Fitness Center, which helps quickly identify the path to supply chain wellness. The Fitness Center allows your team to improve productivity through proven methodologies and state of the art technology.

Symbius' SC Wellness Program has been used by a single division, regional homebuilder to help identify improvements necessary to compete with big builders at the local level. The analysis identified the need for an organizational redesign of the purchasing team, which made them better suited to handle anticipated growth. The SC Fitness Program has been used by a large, multi-division homebuilder to benchmark all of its divisions against one another, and drive best practice adoption across the organization. Following implementation of Symbius recommendations, improvements in efficiency and productivity of up to 10% have been reported.

With the Symbius Supply Chain Fitness Center you can:

  • Develop Sourcing and Purchasing Strategies
  • Align functional areas, divisions, or strategic initiatives
  • Initiate Product Design/Value Engineering programs
  • Optimize Supplier Management
  • Institute Knowledge Management
  • Leverage Technology and Tools More Effectively
  • Organization Planning and Development
  • Implement Performance Management

Available Offerings:

  • Supply Chain Checkup An accelerated two-day evaluation of key supply chain areas focused on identifying quick win opportunities, understanding your supply chain performance against industry leaders, and prioritizing opportunities.
  • Supply Chain Fitness Program A more comprehensive evaluation that includes an implementation approach which focuses on accomplishing quick wins, estimates implementation costs/challenges, and provides an executable action plan for results and change.
  • Supply Chain Wellness Program — Symbius' experienced supply chain professionals will help guide the implementation of a fitness program and aid in driving expedited results.