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The Harrington Consulting Division of Harrington Management Systems focuses on helping organizations identify improvement opportunities, developing solutions and implementing the proposed solutions.

Our consultants are seasoned, experienced managers and engineers that have "been there and done that".

Background

Our Consulting approach is built upon two different but overlapping methodologies. They are:

  • Five Pillars of Organizational Excellence methodology
  • The Total Innovation Management Excellence (TIME) methodology

The Five Pillars of Organizational Excellence are documented in a five book Series. They are:

As you can see the five books series covers all of the key parts and activities that drive an organization to deliver excellent products and services. An extremely important part of the five book series that is often not adequately addressed in improvement programs is the organizational change management methodology and the knowledge management methodology. Of course, the five book series ends with Resource Management Excellence because none of the other performance improvement activities can be accomplished without adequate resources.

The Five Pillars of Excellence
Total Innovation Management Excellence

The 2nd part of our consulting support systems is a book entitled Total Improvement Management (TIM). This methodology focuses on organizational excellence and has been extended to place an emphasis on innovation in the book Total Innovation Management Excellence (TIME).

We are firmly convinced that quality, productivity, risk, and innovation have to be combined into a Total Organizational Management System by combining the TIME methodology and the relevant ISO standards to obtain an effective operating system.




Typical Consulting Performance Improvement engagements include:

Strategic Planning

Harrington Management Systems' consultants have prepared and helped implement numerous strategic short and long-range initiatives.

These initiatives include:

  • • Provided project management for new products and improvement initiatives
  • • On three occasions our subject-matter experts took over a two-year temporary assignment as CEO of a struggling company and the team turned all three of them around to the point that these companies were purchased at a very significant profit.
  • • Completely restructured a city to make it operate in a more customer-centric mode.
  • • Organized and conducted subcontract activities for an organization’s supplier portfolio.
  • • Prepared corporate restructuring analysis and helped with developing the plan and implementation strategy.
  • • Conducted organizational change management analysis to identify roadblocks and helped minimize their impact
  • • Chaired some of our client’s Six Sigma teams
  • • Conducted executive mentoring
  • • Served on client’s Board of Directors
  • • Become members of our client’s research and development teams to help define short-range and long-range new products
  • • Conducted employee opinion surveys and developed action plans at the natural work team level.
  • • Served as interface for our client to ISO audits
  • • Identified improvement opportunities
  • • Helped restructure an organization eliminating two levels of management and almost 100 management assignments without impacting the quality or productivity of the organization
  • • Rewrote the job instructions and the individual work team’s mission statement and job instructions.
  • • Developed management career path plans
  • • Helped prepare total operating manuals for an organization including financial, human relations, development engineering, quality, reliability, and safety operations
  • • Reorganized major international organizations
  • • Developed innovative strategies.
  • • Focused on improvements that impact the bottom line
  • • Established organizational measurement systems
  • • Helped to develop funding plans for developing countries
  • • Optimized use of resources
  • • Established a major not-for-profit quality organization
  • • Served as the official quality advisor on quality to mainland China government
  • • In some cases, we have provided our clients with an experienced manager to work for 2 to 3 years as their CEO. We have also had individuals assigned to assist the President of the company to help re-brand the organizational reputation, while creating an environment under which innovation and process improvement may flourish, to sustain this reputation within the marketplace

Harrington Management Systems (HMS), previously known as Harrington Associates, was founded in the mid-1980s. Although it was originally created to serve as a quality consulting operation, it quickly evolved into a performance improvement consulting firm. HMS has been involved in a diverse variety of projects; some representative engagements are:

  • reorganizing an entire city government
  • providing HMS subject-matter experts as temporary CEOs to run companies who were having problems
  • preparing complete operating manuals
  • developing quality systems
  • designing, setting up, hiring and training 5,000 people to manufacture clothing
  • redesigning new-product development cycles
  • developing three-year strategic improvement strategy and plans

When asked what we do, it’s very simple. We are highly-experienced executives who pride themselves on being able to make things happen quickly.

The Harrington Consulting Division of HMS is the strategic planning, organizational development, and knowledge management division of HMS. This division focuses on the very complex situations that exist in an organization. Our basic operating principle is: “We measure our success based upon our clients’ results.”

Typical activities we’ve been involved in include restructuring the organization to be more customer centric, preparing a five-year improvement plan, running employee opinion surveys, developing rewards and recognition systems, preparing operating manuals, conducting benchmarking studies, and installing supply chain management. In some cases we have provided our clients with an experienced manager to work for 2 to 3 years as their CEO. We have also had individuals assigned to assist the President of an organization to help rebrand itself.

A consulting division is a business of one or more experts (consultants) who provide professional feedback to an individual or an organization for a fee. The types of firms vary, such as technology and advertising firms.

Consultancy firms target company executives and provide them with consultants, also known as industry-specific specialists and subject-matter experts, usually trained in management or business schools. The deliverable of a consultant is usually advice or a recipe to follow to achieve a company objective, leading to a company project.

More and more consulting firms are complementing the strategic deliverables by providing the means to implement the recommendations, either with the consultants themselves or by providing technicians and/or experts. This has opened up new markets for these companies. This is called outsourcing.

The methodology behind our approach is based on there being six core types of consultants within the consulting industry:

  1. 1. Strategy Consultant
  2. 2. Management Consultant
  3. 3. Operations Consultant
  4. 4. Human Resource Consultant
  5. 5. Financial Advisory Consultant
  6. 6. IT Consultant

The Harrington Consulting Division is made up of four of the six core types of consulting. Our organization includes subject-matter experts in management, operations, human resource consulting, strategy planning and implementation , In addition, Harrington consultants gain adequate knowledge to help organizations make decisions related to financial and IT to assist in making value-added an optimization decision.

Our consulting operation is strongly based upon individual experience rather than book learning. We strongly believe that you deliver more value to a client if you have done something than if you have read about how it should be done.

Our clients typically are very well-managed, creative organizations that make excellent use of their resources. For most of our clients their human resources are already committed to more than 100% of their available hours. As a result, we prefer to design our consulting services to minimize the additional workload imposed upon the client’s human and financial resources.

Note: (When we use the word “we,” it is the combination of Harrington Consulting Division's subject-matter experts and our client’s personnel. We believe strongly that before the engagement is over, it is critical that the client feels they own the results and are committed to maintaining them.)