Manufacturing modernization
You’re changing the business. What else has to change with it?
Strategy House works alongside CEOs and leadership teams of established manufacturers to carry a new direction into the way the company sells, serves its customers, and operates.
How we work together
The working relationship
Alongside the CEO,
inside the work.
You’ve been brought in to lead a manufacturer with decades of know-how and parts of the business overdue for attention. You’re deciding which products to keep, who should lead the sales team, or whether to buy a building. Your people can tell you how the company got here. The direction for what comes next has to come from you.
That’s where I begin. I work directly with you and your leadership team as those decisions take shape. Then I go to the people who know the business to understand what each decision changes for them, for their colleagues, and for your customers.
I take responsibility for designing the systems that work requires. Your people contribute their judgment, test what we build, and help shape how it will work in practice. Our work can span several years as the business changes. I stay through implementation and handoff so your team can run and adapt what we build.
From a manufacturing engagement
One sales team became two.
A commercial catalog revealed how much else the decision touched.
A truck equipment manufacturer separated its commercial work-truck business from its municipal business, which served cities and airports. The change reached the factory floor as the teams needed different space and production lines were reorganized.
Then commercial sales needed a catalog. For years, each new product had taken the next available page. A truck the company built in volume appeared alongside a specialist model it could source from a partner. Buyers had little way to tell the difference. When marketing asked what to say, sales turned to engineering. The specifications explained the equipment. Buyers still needed help choosing it.
Working with the team, we organized the commercial offering into four categories of work trucks, distinguished what the company made from what it sourced, and worked out what a buyer needed to know on each page. Those decisions gave the sales team a way to explain the range and marketing a structure for the next product.
The modernization approach
How a decision becomes a way of working.
I work through six connected systems with your team. All six matter. How much needs to be built in each depends on the business you’ve inherited and the direction you’re taking it.
- Identity
- Establish with leadership where the business is going, who it will serve, and what that means for sales and service.
- Architecture
- Design the structures people will use, from the way products are grouped to how an inquiry moves through the company.
- Expression
- Give people the language and materials to explain what the company offers and why it matters.
- Experience
- Walk through the change from the perspective of the people who encounter it. Can a buyer choose? Can an employee help?
- Intelligence
- Make product knowledge, decisions, and the reasoning behind them accessible to the next person who needs them.
- Embodiment
- Put the systems into use, adjust them with the people doing the work, and establish who will carry them forward.
The person you’ll work with
Kathryn Felten
Business Architect & Strategic Advisor
When you engage Strategy House, you work directly with me. I spent seven years running Strategy House and working with leaders of established businesses, including manufacturers.
I want to hear why you’re making a change while the decision is still taking shape. It gives me a chance to see the implications with you, bring the right people into the work, and take responsibility for what needs to be designed between departments.
Start a conversation
What have you been
asked to change?
I’d be interested to hear what you’re finding as you get closer to the business and where another perspective could help.
K@StrategyHouse.com