Continuous Improvement

Prophet One’s focus is to help clients increase shareholder value by developing high-performance teams, improving profitability and accelerating growth. We do this by engaging organizations in a business transformation process that moves them through the critical stages of change.

Our Value

Improved service quality
Reduced operational costs
Greater customer satisfaction
Examination of your company through the eyes of a customer
Provides focus and a structured plan for improvement
Tactical and strategic assessment
Successfully addresses the Strategic Opportunities for Improvement
The assessment process also serves as an excellent diagnostic tool in support of Six Sigma and Lean Management Implementation

Lean Thinking

Lean Thinking (or simply Lean) can best be described as the relentless pursuit, identification, and elimination of waste in all business processes. Business processes over time tend to become fat, bloated, and inefficient.

Lean Thinking revolves around developing teams to identify, then reduce waste through strategies such as workplace organization, mistake-proofing, and visual management. In addition, there is a focus on reducing raw material, work in process, and finished-goods inventory through Just-in-Time production (another improvement tool). Lean Thinking is a more intuitive improvement process than Six Sigma, requiring less in-depth training. This allows more extensive deployment of Lean Thinking training to a broader employee base.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is an extremely effective tool for systematically attacking the highest priority production and support/functional problems within an organization. A goal of Six Sigma is to reduce defects variation within a work process. It is not, however, the best tool to apply to every problem. Six Sigma requires a significant investment in up-front training, time and people to carry out the projects, and leadership commitment to project reviews. Some problems may not require Six Sigma’s highly intensive methodology. Effective leaders separate the problems that deserve a Six Sigma approach from those requiring a different methodology.

Balanced Scorecard

Today’s Balanced Scorecard is a tool that derives from the principles in the original Baldrige Criteria of 1988. Namely, that effective leaders take a balanced look at key results measures of an organization rather than rely too much on financial measures, which provide an historical look at organizational performance. Accordingly, the basis for this tool is that business results are integrated – that leaders should not view one measure in isolation without acknowledging the relation to other results. A Balanced Scorecard looks at four “perspectives” of the business:

Financial: “To succeed financially, how should we appear to our shareholders?”
Customer: “To achieve our vision, how should we appear to our customers?”
Internal Business Processes: “To satisfy our shareholders and customers, at what business processes must we excel?”
Learning and Growth: “To achieve our vision, how will we sustain our ability to change and improve?

Objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives are developed for each of the identified perspectives.

Baldrige Processes

The Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence have the over-arching goal of strengthening U.S. competitiveness in an increasingly global and competitive marketplace. The Baldrige Criteria focus on helping organizations use a focused and systematic approach to performance management that results in:

Delivery of ever-improving value to customers, contributing to marketplace success
Improvement of overall organizational effectiveness and capabilities
Organizational and personal learning