Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) Business Management System Advocacy Selling

One who has been exposed to Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) training and sees how their organization can benefit from the methodology often ask how they can sell IEE to management – since they believe IEE is what their organization needs.

These inside-company cheerleaders see IEE as:

- An enhanced 21st century business management system that addresses the problems of the day

- A no-nonsense business governance system, where predictive metrics are integrated with a blending of analytics and innovation strategy creation so that the system encourages beneficial behaviors throughout the organization.

- Improvement projects with this system are selected so that they are not siloed and the business as a whole benefits through the use of enhanced theory of constraint (TOC) methods.

- A system for enhancing their design project selection and execution; i.e., goes beyond Lean Six Sigma Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)

- A system for implementing Edwards Deming philosophy and Phil Crosby methodology with enhancements

- An enhanced quality management system for Malcolm Baldrige award achievement system

- An executive management business system for Shingo Prize award achievement system

My response to the question of advocacy selling IEE is that what one needs to do is get an understanding of upper management’s issues or pains. What is then needed is to present a solution to address those needs.

One formula for getting executive management’s buy-in is the following:

1. Determine a targeted leading-thinking decision maker who is well respected in the company and wants to do the right thing for the organization, as a whole.

2. Create a meeting with this leading-thinking influencer. To stimulate thoughts relative to relieving his/her pain, you might ask if one or more of the following issues is something that they can relate to:

- Nothing seems to be getting better even though much time is being spent using scorecards or reporting metrics

- Long-term gains are not being achieved by process improvement initiatives

- Expected benefit are not being provided by strategies

From his/her response, you can usually identify their experienced pain. IEE can often be presented as the pain reliever to address their identified issues.

3. If they are now interested in learning more about IEE, one or more of the following can be used to explain IEE and its benefits that organizations are experiencing from the methodology. These items could be shown as a group and discussed or they could be reviewed separately and then discussed. A presentation could be given where it is shown how your company’s situation is not much different from the issues described in the webinar, perhaps using example data for a presentation.

- IEE webinar showing issues that the system resolves: “Why Go Beyond Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard“.

- IEE article: “C-Suite: The Need to Re-think our Business System’s Strategic Planning, Scorecard Creation, and Process Improvement Efforts”

- IEE deployment video: “Oracle Packaging Case Study”

- IEE deployment article: “An American Management Association article”

- Roadmap book series: “IEE 4-book series”

4. If the leading thinking influencer/decision maker would like to now look into see if IEE could be a good fit for your organization, a short conference call with me could result in putting plans together a one-day to one-week on-site hands-on IEE assessment with deliverables.