Featured Partners

THE CUMBERLAND GROUP
Consultants and Project Managers
Specialists in…

Having developed pioneering methods for use inside their parent company in 1981, word spread about the results, and Cumberland was drawn into consultation, planning, training and project management services for a broad range of leading companies.

The Cumberland consultants are seasoned pros (20+ years) with operations backgrounds so they recommend practical solutions that make sense to management teams.

The Cumberland Group: A Closer Look
Click on the following pages for detailed information…

Starter Services: Lean Continual Improvement and ERP ValueLink

Key Contributor: Michael Bremer

Key Contributor: Brian McKibben

Success Story: Elkay Manufacturing: Actualizing Continuous Improvement in

Mid-Market Manufacturing

Success Story: Redesigning Core Business Processes at Johnsonville Foods

Success Story: Developing a Manufacturing Strategy at Flexco

Success Story: Lean Manufacturing case study, Champion/Gardner Denver

upgrades assembly operations

Success Story: First Card Visa utilizes Value-Stream mapping to cut

$500,000 in expense while improving customer response

cycle time by over 400% for half of all billing disputes.

Resources: White Paper: Business Process Redesign

Clients
Cumberland clients include many prominent Fortune 500 companies. They have one thing in common - they believe that continuous improvement of products, services and business processes is essential to success. And they believe that the best management practices can come from industries outside their own. Clients include:

Apple Computer
Chemical Bank
The Chamberlain Group (door openers and control systems)
Champion Pneumatic (air compressors)
Commonwealth Edison (electric utility)
Elkay Manufacturing Company (stainless steel sinks, wood cabinets)
First Card (credit card processing operations)
General Dynamics (aircraft manufacturing)
Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Integrated Metal Technology, Inc./ Herman Miller (office furniture)
Johnsonville Foods (meat products)
Lucent Technologies (communications equipment)
Moen, Inc. (faucets and plumbing fixtures)
Nascote Industries (first tier automotive supplier)
Staley (A. E.) Manufacturing Co. (food ingredients processing)
United Technologies (air conditioners, elevators, jet engines)
Voluntary Hospitals of America

The Cumberland Group Strengths

1. Practical. Cumberland consultants are experienced practitioners with line management backgrounds. They know and recommend methods that work.

2. Holistic. We balance the technical and human elements to ensure sustainable success. The most powerful new technologies will fall flat in the long run without appropriate organizational support systems.

3. Conservative. Cumberland provides focused expertise as needed to leverage clients' internal capabilities. We will not sell more help than is needed.

4. High Value. Our results-oriented methods save our clients time and money, proven over hundreds of applications.

5. Quality. The Cumberland Group practices the business quality fundamentals which are at the core of our service methodologies. We "sweat the details."

- Customer / supplier partnership
- Conformance to requirements
- Prevention of defects
- Doing it right the first time
- Measurement as the springboard to improvement
- Involvement of the right people and all their talents
- Continual improvement as a cultural norm

6. Clarity. We simplify complex situations, and encourage our client partners to take decisive action in the belief that good plans implemented today will beat any competitor with the best plan that gets implemented later.

Performance Management Strategies - How Cumberland Adds Value
The Cumberland strategies are a hands-on integrated approach to business effectiveness which produces predictable, consistent, sustainable results.

Critical Business Process Redesign Projects

Have your key business processes become inefficient and ineffective over time due to changing personnel, changing customer requirements and a changing competitive landscape? Cumberland's Critical Process Redesign approach breaks a business process down to its basic steps, compares it to precise customer requirements, eliminates all waste activities, and streamlines the value-adding steps to develop world-class operations. Specific applications often include:

- Lean Flow Manufacturing
- Supply Chain Optimization
- ERP Optimization
- Support Processes Management

Kaizen ImpAct Projects © - streamlined, cost-effective approaches to gather vital information about industry trends, buyer perspectives and competitor behavior.

Effective Business Teams Do your project teams deliver stretch performance improvement, meet project deadlines and have buy-in from the people effected by a change? Cumberland's high performance business team methods are proven structures to organize management teams, work teams and project teams for inspired actions, built on trust, and sustained by an effective foundation. No one knows more about practical team development than Cumberland. Typical team situations include:

- Executive and management teams
- Project teams
- Operating work teams

Effective Business Teams Do your business strategies need to go beyond a bullet point outline - to something measurable that people can strive for in day-to-day operations? Measurement triggers action by clearly defining current performance, quantifying ideal performance, and identifying the gaps to be addressed by management and employee actions. "You cannot improve what you do not measure." The Cumberland approach to balanced performance measures ensures that everyone is focused on the right measures - the ones that will move the organization in line with your planned strategy. Typical measurements include:

- Customer Loyalty Factors
- Product and Service Features
- Operating Process Performance
- Management and Support Systems Effectiveness
- Employee Satisfaction and Productivity
- Balanced Business Scorecard

Continual Improvement Business Culture Creativity and spontaneous improvement actions don't happen spontaneously!Four basic management processes focus the entire workforce on the fundamentals of quality, productivity and innovation - to reduce waste, achieve faster response times and anticipate customer needs in daily operations. They're part of the proven Cumberland processes customized for Fortune 500 companies who have implemented Learning Organization, Employee Involvement and Continual Improvement initiatives. Typical objectives include:

- Immediate critical business processes improvement
- Robust incremental continual improvement program
- Employee involvement in continual improvement efforts
- Customer-focused service improvement

Background

The Cumberland Group developed as a service group within a major U.S. corporation in 1981. They achieved their original mission by helping the parent corporation make dramatic quality and productivity improvements, resulting in new customers and higher profits. By 1984 the visible improvements prompted some corporate customers to demand the same services, drawing Cumberland into public consulting. The original principals purchased Cumberland from the corporate parent in 1988.

Mission

"To help our clients achieve rapid, continuous improvement of products, services, business processes and working relationships."

Cumberland delivers:

- Operating techniques that make business teamwork real, not academic
- Management processes that focus, simplify and accelerate decision-making
- Leading-edge concepts like complexity theory applied to real-world problems
- Consultants with operating management backgrounds to guide business

teams toward practical solutions

Cumberland Professionals

The Cumberland professional staff includes thirty principals and associates based in Albuquerque, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Washington, D.C.:

- Cumberland professionals come from line management backgrounds and

approach client situations from a practical point of view.
- They average over 25 years experience.
- They are effective project managers.
- They take responsibility for results.