Production for Management Consultants and Business Analysts

Course details

Course summary

What is the aim of this course?

This course will help you drastically improve your knowledge and skills in optimizing production and operations of any company through a series of practical cases. It is designed for people who want to become consultants, business analysts or have to run and optimize production on a daily bases. In the course you will learn 3 things:

1. How to understand any production or operational activities
2. How to optimize the production and operations in order to get more things done, cheaper at higher quality with less resources
3. Where to look for savings and improvements, how to calculate potential savings in Excel and implement them

The course is based on my 12 years of experience as a consultant in top consulting companies and as a Board Member responsible for strategy, improvement and turn-arounds in biggest companies from FMCG, SMG, B2B sector that I worked for. On many occasions I had to optimize the whole production and operational side of the businesses I was responsible for.  On the basis of what you will find in this course I have trained over 100 consultants, business analysts and managers who now are Production Directors, Operational  Directors, COO, Investment Directors, Directors in Consulting Companies, Board Members etc.

I teach through cases so most of the lectures are case studies showing some business problems solved in Excel. There will be also overview of main techniques used in optimizing and running production. To every lecture you will find attached  (in additional resources) the Excels shown in the Lecture so as a part of this course you will also get a library of ready-made analyses that can, with certain modification, be applied by you in your work.

Why I decided to create this course?
Most consultants and business analysts are terrible at organizing operational issues. They treat the operations, especially production, as a black-box and try to avoid it at any cost. Technical things overwhelm them and they shy away from them. This approach is not the right one as you find elements that resemble production everywhere. In hospitals most procedures performed are very similar to production issues. The same goes for running a call center, a chain of restaurants, a logistic company or a firm delivering specialized services. Everywhere you have operations that you can optimize by using techniques that I will show in this course.  Production influence heavily other areas especially sales and marketing. Therefore, it is a good idea to have at least a general knowledge in production. The funny things is that to be good at production you do not even have to be technical at all. I have not finished any technical school and I am pretty good in finding significant improvements in production. One of the best Production Directors I know has finished Pedagogical Studies.

To sum it up, I believe that if you want to build or to find improvements in any business you should master techniques related to optimizing production. That is why I highly recommend this course not only to consultants or business analyst that have to advice their customer but also to owners, founders  of businesses as well as production directors.

In what way will you benefit from this course?
The course is a practical, step by step guide loaded with tones of analyses, tricks, hints that will significantly improve the speed with which you find and analyze production. There is little theory - mainly examples, a lot of tips from my own experience as well as other notable examples worth mentioning. Our intention is that thanks to the course you will know:    

1. How to understand production
2. How to optimize it
3. Where to look for savings and improvement in production
4. How to calculate the impact of proposed changes in Excel

You can also ask me any question either through the discussion mode or by messaging me directly.

How the course is organized?
The course is divided currently in 6 sections and will be adding new section to address other important issues. Currently you will find the following sections:

• Introduction. We begin with little intro into the course as well as some general info on production
• Basic methods of improving production. In the second section I will discuss the basic techniques that you can use to optimize your business. Here you will find the potential low hanging fruits
• Continuous Flow. The ideal in production is the so called continuous flow -every go smoothly and fast. Products are being produced fast and cheap. In this section I will tell you how to achieve it.
• Advanced methods of improving production. In section 4 I will continuous with more advanced way in which you can improve your production such as: SMED, TPM, Automation, Critical Chain
• Capacity management. Apart from optimizing the production you have to think strategically and know when you have to add new capacity / factory. In this section I will show you how you can do that
• Production planning. Production planning is the brain of production. If you get this wrong the other things won't matter. In this section I will show you some ways in which you can analyze and improve production planning

I will be adding new sections and lectures in the coming months

You will be able also to download many additional resources

1. Excels with analyses shown in the course
2. Presentation of slides show in the course
3. Links to additional presentations and movies
4. Links to books worth reading

At the end of my course, students will be able to…

• Analyze production process
• Improve production process - make it faster, cheaper and at higher quality
• Calculate in Excel the potential impact of proposed changes
• Apply improvement techniques to other fields and industries

Who should take this course? Who should not?

• Consultants
• Production Directors
• Business analysts
• Small and medium business owners
• Startups founders
• Controllers

What will students need to know or do before starting this course?

• Basic or intermediate Excel
• Basic knowledge of economics or finance