Business Consulting, Marketing Services, Market Research & Market Structure Studies in Houston, TX

A. B. Clark Marketing's Ability to Foster Productivity Gains and Boost Quality Stemmed from Dr. Clark's Academic and Fortune 100 Corporate Work

Dr. Clark took graduate courses that dealt with Production Management and he worked in the Quality Assurance Department of Con Agra Frozen Foods. While at Con Agra, he managed quality assurance and regulatory affairs programs for Armour, Banquet, Chun King, Healthy Choice, Morton and Patio food products and handled more than 125 new products each month. As a result of this and other operating company experience, Dr. Clark gained valuable quality assurance and government regulatory "know-how" for manufacturing enterprises.

Later, Dr. Clark handled quality assurance issues in a service environment. Specifically, he had to ensure that the data used in analyses was reliable and accurate, when he worked for companies in the airline, direct mail and marketing research industries. Thus, Dr. Clark was able to assemble and train a team that can address quality and productivity issues in businesses ranging from hierarchically-managed production to matrix-organized service environments.

A. B. Clark Marketing Analyses Each and Every Total Quality Management Area to Find Ways to Improve Products

Because of Dr. Clark's training and experience, A. B. Clark Marketing focuses on all elements of Total Quality Management (TQM), including Six Sigma Programs. In other words, A. B. Clark Marketing helps corporate leaders manage the entire organization so that it excels on all dimensions of goods and services that are important to the customer. To accomplish this it helps corporations:

Yet, it involves not only Effectiveness (i.e., obtaining desired results) but Efficiency (i.e., getting certain output with minimal input). Thus, productivity is often redefined as:

However, while the definitions of productivity are inherently easy to understand there are many different ways to measure productivity. A. B. Clark is uniquely qualified to help you determine and improve productivity using an array of partial to multifactor to total measurement tools.

In short, A. B. Clark helps its clients in five areas that are critical to improving productivity. These are:

An Example of Problem and How A. B. Clark Improved Productivity

Problem: It was taking a major company close to a year to introduce new products. This meant that whenever a competitor had a successful new product launch, the competitor was able to strongly secure its position in the marketplace and was in some cases launching a line extension before the company was introducing its first product into a new subcategory.

Solution: A. B. Clark prepared a flowchart of the activities that were needed to launch a new product. In the process, it was found that it was typically taking more than three months to get internal approvals on packages, before they could be presented to government regulators.

The reason is that a "carton sketch" was sent in a circuitous route to (1) Product Development, (2) Quality Assurance, (3) Manufacturing, (4) Labeling, (5) Product Directions, (6) Marketing, and (7) Packaging Departments. If one person was on vacation the paperwork could be stalled for quite sometime before it went onto the next person.

When a problem was encountered at any step of the way, a new sketch was prepared and the process was started again. Then, once all the internal approvals were obtained, the sketch and all accompanying paperwork were sent via ordinary postal mail to a corporate representative in Washington, D.C. who presented the information to the necessary government regulators.

If the government had concerns, the internal approval process started again with a new sketch and new paperwork. Then, once a sketch and its accompanying paperwork were approved by the government, the first cartons from a print-run went through the same laborious internal approval process before they were finally sent via ordinary mail to Washington, D.C.

The solution that dramatically reduced this laborious cycle was to have a "coordinator" send out multiple copies of the sketch and accompanying paperwork. One went to each person who could sign off on his or her area of responsibility, or alternatively say what needed to be corrected. The result was that sketches were less likely to get "stalled" in someone's in-box and sit for days on end.

When a problem was found a corrected sketch and accompanying paperwork was then sent to each individual who had found a problem and not to everyone else. The paperwork was then faxed, rather than sent via ordinary postal mail to the corporate representative in Washington who could get the sketch in front of the appropriate government regulator within two to three days.

If the government found problems, the corrections were handled only with those who were affected and a new sketch and paperwork were faxed to the corporate representative in Washington, D.C. Then, once the sketch and accompanying paperwork were signed off on by the government, cartons were printed. However, rather than sending the final cartons via ordinary mail the first cartons printed were immediately sent to the company's Washington, D.C. representative via Federal Express.

The result of these changes was that the entire regulatory process went from often taking several months to consistently taking less than three weeks. Because of these improvements in productivity, the company can more rapidly respond to competitive challenges.