• Especially in these difficult economic times, the biggest operational challenge to management is keeping our employees engaged. A major nationwide study has shown that over 50% of the working population is not engaged in their work; they are being distracted. Therefore, the biggest operational challenge is building and maintaining a high-performance, fully engaged workforce.

  Our labor force is changing, morale is being under minded by market uncertainty,layoffs and individuals in the workforce are less motivated, want less responsibility, are less educated, and are widely diverse in age, background and lifestyle. Building a high-performance, fully engaged workforce means an organization must analyze and prepare a plan to retain only the best employees who will have a positive attitude under the gloom of uncertainty, be focused and engaged, and deliver results.

  Engaged employees are excited and enthusiastic about their jobs. They resist distractions, tend to forget about time and routinely produce significantly more than the job requires. They enjoy searching for ways to improve circumstances and volunteer for difficult assignments. They also encourage others to higher levels of performance. Finally, they are proud to be involved with their organization and are more likely to stay with the company.

• Phase I – The Profiles XT (PXT) looks at the entire person; thinking style, behavior and interests. For instance, it will measure a person’s energy level and attitude as compared to the greater population. It also looks at the ideal characteristics for the job(s) that you need done and matches the right person to the job(s) with a high degree of accuracy.

• CheckPoint360 – Used for leadership development, it provides candid feedback from boss, peers and subordinates
• CustomerService Perspective – CSR skills assessment and alignment to corporate Customer Service Strategy
• Organizational Management Report – Empirically verifies cultural alignment with corporate vision, mission, and strategic goals
• Profiles XT – Match the total person to the job; thinking style, behavior and interests
• Profiles XT Sales – Match the total sales person to the sales position
• Sales Indicator – Salesperson skills assessment
• StepOneSurvey II – Character Counts - Integrity, Work Ethic, Substance Abuse, Reliability
• Work Force Compatibility – Conflict resolution between supervisor and employee made easy

• Organizational Development (OD) can be defined as "the practice of changing people and organizations for positive growth." In practice, OD can take on many forms, and typical OD activities can include some of the following:
• Paradigm Shifts
• Career development & succession planning
• Hiring, job fit, and team-building
• Innovation & business breakthroughs
• Talent management
• Organizational assessments & cultural alignment
• Training & higher education
• Coaching & mentoring
• Leadership development
• Change management

• Phase I – Get the right people involved - We cannot literally clone your top performers, but we can come close. Improving sustainable revenue first requires that you have the right people involved and recognize that each product, related group of products, and business culture requires a different set of selling & business behaviors to succeed. Using our assessment tools, we will measure the behavior of your best personnel, and create a “Benchmark” profile of them. You will then hire into that Benchmark profile; thereby hiring people that share successful thinking styles, behavior and interests.
• Phase II – Organizational assessment and cultural alignment – High performance organizations have strong, healthy cultures with firm linkage to strategies, policies, practices, and systems. We can provide an in-depth analysis of your culture along with an assessment of the extent to which that linkage is in place and supportive of your goals. Our uncommonly practical assessment and analysis is based on a combination of survey and interview methods developed over twenty years of action research. Our approach identifies any gaps in alignment and the impact of those gaps on performance. We explain the gaps and the impact in simple language using common-sense modemodels with strong roots in management science.
• Phase III – Change implementation - Our assessment and analysis will result in recommendations for change that will reduce alignment gaps and release the performance potential of your organization. Some changes are fairly simple and take relatively little time to implement. Others can be dramatic and require significant planning and time to achieve. In any case we will provide a roadmap to higher performance tailored to your organization, its business, its people, and its culture. The roadmap will include exactly what must change, what the change will achieve, and how the change should be pursued. We make no empty promises. We tell the unvarnished truth about where you stand and what it will take to move your organization toward greater productivity, appropriate control, and increased satisfaction for stakeholders.

• Trusted Advisor(s) can be defined as "an individual or group with whom one has confidence, can depend upon to deliver, or permit to stay or go or to do something without fear of disappointment or misgiving; to believe and rely upon for discretion, candor, truthfulness, accuracy of information, and good judgment.”

  In today’s highly competitive business environment, successful senior executives rely on Trusted Advisors for advice, objectivity and expertise as they navigate through the complexities of leading and managing their business. Through Craft Strategies’ program of Trusted Advisory support, a corporate leader has access to several Trusted Advisors that provide the additional advantage that he or she needs to deal with strategic and tactical issues.

Approach:

• Phase I – Identify the pool of Advisors – Identification of comfortable and compatible resources who will be the catalyst and/or source of your business and career solutions. Comfort and compatibility are judgments made by the client after meeting, interacting with, and reviewing a profile of Craft Strategies’ recommended advisors. Recommendations are made on the basis of professional credentials, experience, and the Advisors’ confidence that as a team, they can help in the particular situation. Of course, the final selection of an Advisory Team is solely in the hands of the client.
• Phase II – Build Trust – Trust in an advisor team can only come from direct experience with that team. In this phase of our work we will, in concert with the client, design a set of experiences that will demonstrate our team’s trustworthiness. Via these shared experiences, the client will gain confidence that the team will do as they say they will do; will listen carefully and completely to the client’s needs, wants, and desires; will provide honest and caring feedback as well as excellent services to the client’s organization; will accept full accountability for all aspects of their personal and professional behavior; and will demonstrate a bias toward acting on the client’s behalf in all instances. Consistency in these things is the hallmark of Craft Strategies’ people and services.
• Phase III – Maintain the relationship – Craft Strategies’ Advisor Team will meet with the client according to a pre-arranged schedule to update information related to the client’s needs and renew plans for supportive processes ranging from designed interventions within the client’s organization to direct coaching of the client. Of course, team members will also be readily available on call to respond immediately to any crisis that might arise for the client or the client’s organization.
• Phase IV – Think outside the box – Conventional wisdom about trusted advisor services calls for a one-to-one relationship between the client and a single advisor. We have found that reliance on a single source for critical advice in high-stakes situations can be insufficient in today’s complex world of organizational life. It is a set of resources with deep knowledge and experience in the blended disciplines of people/talent, processes, and technology that is necessary to adequately advise a senior executive today. Franklin Roosevelt had his “kitchen cabinet” and smart executives have their trusted advisors. While this is not a familiar model of counsel, we are sure that it responds to the realities of the day and the needs of senior executives leading their organizations through extremely difficult times. As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that helped to create the problem.”

• Facilitation is the act of making something easier. Craft Strategies’ (CS) dedication to improving profitability through the blending of people, process and technology, includes making things easier for today’s overloaded executives. Organization leaders are traditionally chosen for their ability to drive outcomes, not to facilitate them. Despite the fact that management science and experience teach us that only driving outcomes gives us short-term payoffs, and not necessarily, long term benefits. CS provides that critical element of facilitation necessary for metrics-based planning, divergent problem-solving (breakthrough), team cohesion, and long-term value delivery. We will help you to plan a desirable future and invent ways of constructing it so that you can drive implementation of the right things in the right way with all of the right people in agreement and committed to the outcome.

Approach:

• Phase I – Articulate the Goals – Since all human behavior is goal-directed, making goals clear and important is crucial to focused business processes. Goal-setting is at once a straightforward and simple process and the beginning of what can be a complex management system. Our many years of experience in helping people to articulate goals for themselves and their organizations makes us uniquely qualified to work with executives and their teams to lay the foundation for profit-producing behavior across an enterprise. Without this foundation of certain direction, organizations can waste extraordinary amounts of resources chasing unaligned outcomes. Depending upon the scope of impact for the intended goal system, CS will make building it easy, and in as little as a few hours or as much as a few days. We are the catalyst to your growth.
• Phase II – Process Design - CS will work with either the entire team or a core team of project leaders to design an appropriate process for creating plans that put the right people at work on the right things in the right way. Whether the goal is defining a problem, solving a problem, planning some initiative, or implementing change, CS has the methodology and the professional skills to get the job done at the lowest practical cost possible.
• Phase III – Group Work and Evaluation - The truth is that most group work that is pursued without the aid of a skilled facilitator fails to get the job done. Facilitation is not a core skill for the vast majority of organization leaders because facilitation requires a great deal of practice with feedback. Add to this the fact that personal involvement in these processes disables the objectivity necessary for effective facilitation. CS advisors have been making complex things easier for organizations for many years. They have the skill and know the art of getting the critical work done while maintaining respect for the participants and the integrity of the work process. Included in the facilitation process is ongoing evaluation of its effectiveness against metrics selected during the design phase. This ongoing evaluation allows the client to both see results quickly and change direction with minimal sunk cost.

Benefits:

• High quality results
• Objective and unbiased meeting facilitation
• Measurable results
• Cost reductions
• Productivity increases
• Achieving targeted throughput
• Participant satisfaction
• With the process
• With the outcomes
• With their contributions
• With consensus
• Both human and dollar capital efficiencies
• Minimal time spent for maximum outputs
• Transfer of "how-to" knowledge where desired

• What is Professional Development?
• By definition professionals have a unique body of knowledge and/or special skills that enable them to add value in organizations or in practice serving individuals. Professionals are not born. They are developed across cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor dimensions. This development process is truly never-ending because the knowledge and skills that define a profession continue to expand as both academic and applied research reveals new knowledge about dealing with emerging challenges in a changing world. So, professional development supports and/or extends that cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor growth that keeps a professional sharp and up to date.
• Who Is Dr. Saracco?
• More than thirty years ago, Don Saracco made a life commitment to the development of human potential. This commitment led him to study education, individual psychology, and organizational development formally and in the context of his employment as a functional manager, a personal counselor, a corporate training and development professional and corporate executive. His education culminated in an earned doctorate in Human Performance at Work from the University of Southern California (and yes, UCLA is also a very fine school).

  After serving in the United States Air Force as a commissioned officer, Dr. Saracco moved into the private sector for direct experience in leading and managing in a nationwide NGO; a large HMO System; a Fortune 500 manufacturer and marketer of consumer goods; and the executive team of a services holding company. His first twenty years of work life urged him to choose a role thereafter as an external rather than internal consultant and he has been doing that and teaching at the graduate level ever since. Don’s greatest satisfaction as a person comes when a client reaches a new level of joy associated with realizing his or her potential.

  Dr. Saracco lives in Brea, CA with his wife, Melanie and their two cats, Emily and Oso, as well as the occasional friend or relative.

• What Does He Offer?
• Keynotes
• A keynote presentation should do several things. It should communicate a message consistent with the purpose of the event of which it is a part. It should be mildly entertaining. It should introduce knowledge, ideas, or information that is new to or newly resonant with the audience. It should be an appropriate length (People can tolerate sitting still for a good presentation for about twenty minutes. A really good presentation can get you an hour). It should challenge without offending and assert with reason. Dr. Saracco achieves all of these and can create a customized Keynote for your organization or you may choose from the following topic areas:
• “Life after Downsizing” (In these times of economic crisis, many organizations will reduce staff, capacity, and products to adapt to softer markets. This is the right time to rebuild the organization for the tomorrow that is emerging before us)
• "Transition after Landing” (Landing the job is just the beginning. Getting up to speed in the new environment quickly and effectively is the real test.)
• “Practical, Principled Leadership” (There is no template for leadership. Doing the right things depends upon an inside-out growth process.)
• “Organizing for Work, Organizing for Emergencies: They Are Not the Same” (In an age when command and control is being abandoned for participative systems, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.)
• “An Evolutionary Discussion of Organization Design” (Form follows function. What functions do deep and horizontal designs each follow? Which is better?)
• “Do It Yourself Change Management “(A simple, but not necessarily easy, change management process.)
• “Five Steps to Personal Perfection” (We can all use a personal dashboard to help with self-management.)
• “There Are Teams and Then There Are Teams: Which Do You Have?” (Context, Composition, Competence, and Change – the key attributes of team structure.)
• “How to Build a Team before Lunch and Lose Inches in the Process” (A simple design for launching project? and other teams quickly and easily. Losing inches may or may not occur in all cases.)
• “How Good Managers Make Bad Decisions” (The phenomenon of “Gap Creep” and how managers cause it by sincere efforts to do what they think is good for the organization.)
• Many others.
• Luncheon/Dinner Presentations
• A luncheon/dinner presentation is different in that people expect something from it called “take-away value.” Takeaway value comes in many forms. Sometimes it is as little as a warm feeling that one has been validated by an expert. It may be a new job aid that is provided as a handout for the presentation. It could be inspiration from the presenter to enable a breakthrough in solving a problem at work or in life. It could be something else. The real meaning of value for an individual is very individual, but there has to be this perception of value delivered as a take-away.

  Dr. Saracco is a teacher and makes it a point of personal honor to include some learnable knowledge or usable technique in every presentation. Take-away value is guaranteed for those open to learning.

• Workshops
• Don provides principle-driven management advisory services associated with strengthening the linkage between organization design and management practices/systems, but he has never lost his love for human development. Not normally one to seek the limelight, Dr. Saracco conducts high energy, high demand workshops for those willing or eager to seek personal or organizational change. The key word here is “work” since it is Dr. Saracco’s ability to facilitate the development work of others that makes him an uncommonly valuable addition to your learning plans.

  The content and process design of workshops is always customized to meet the specific needs of Don’s clients. They range from personal journeys of self-discovery, through team and group training, to instructional sessions aimed at teaching specific management concepts and/or skills. The bulk of his workshop experience is centered on leadership and team development. He also conducts special executive training in areas of organizational behavior and management science that can help solve a problem or execute dramatic change.

  In addition, Dr. Saracco provides confidential counsel to those whose journey to personal excellence must be more internal before it can become external.

• We teach management how to hire and coach new & existing staff, manage their sales force resources, and teach accounting how to forecast sales using probability-of-close analysis.

Approach:

• Phase I – Get the right people involved - We cannot literally clone your top performers, but we can come close. Improving sustainable revenue first requires that you have the right people involved and recognize that each product, related group of products, and business culture requires a different set of selling behaviors to succeed. Using our “Profiles PXT” assessment tool, we will measure the selling behavior of your best salespersons, and create a “Benchmark” profile of them. You will then hire into that Benchmark profile; thereby hiring into that “Benchmark” image.
• Phase II – Organize Sales Resources - Customize the company’s sales cycles, identify milestones, itemize responsibilities, and assign probability of close.

Benefits:

• Sales forecasting with confidence
• Build sales teams
• Checklist of sales tools per phase
• Common sales vocabulary/communications
• Common "win" strategy per phase
• Establish prospect qualification rules
• Integrates business unit responsiblities
• Identifies discrete business/sales needs
• Identifies a common purpose and goals
• Improves close rate / sales revenue
• Increases salesman's confidence (knows)
• Maintenance of suspect/prospect portfolio
• Order/Forecast stock
• Sales do not fall "through-the-cracks"

• We specialize in developing and delivering fully customized and actionable customer experience management solutions. The mission of our practice is to grow and strengthen your business through increasing client satisfaction, loyalty, and value, while developing and retaining your best Customer Service Representatives (CSRs).

  The value proposition for the Customer Experience Practice is to enable your company to have satisfied customers and reoccurring revenue with add on sales/revenue within 90 days.

  Using proven personnel assessment tools that were developed specifically for the customer service organization, proprietary methodologies, and innovative processes, we employ exemplary customer-centric strategies through the application of sound business practices. All of our services are individually customized to your company’s specific needs in order to maximize your bottom-line.

  Some of our customized Customer Experience services are:

  • Business-Critical reporting
  • Brand development
  • Customer service solutions
  • Client retention programs
  • Customer experience management solutions
  • Customer relationship marketing
  • Customer loyalty programs
  • CRM system and technology services
  • Competitive analysis
  • Customer/Market validation
  • CRM software package evaluation (ie; SAP, Oracle, etc.)
  • Customer experience tracking & reporting
  • Up-Sell & cross-sell programs
  • Client revenue generation solutions
  • Client satisfaction solutions
  • Change management
  • Mind share solutions
  • Sales & negotiation training
  • Situation selling strategies
  • Pricing strategies
  • Partner/Distribution validation and strategies
  • Technology implementation - CRM, CTI, etc.

Approach:

• Phase I – Get the right people involved – Having people who are bright, communicative, analytic, and have a common perception of the organization’s preferences toward the treatment of its customers is critical to the success of any customer service marketing strategy. The Customer Service Perspective (CSP) from Profiles International provides the methodology, individual assessments, and coaching information to quantify the company’s customer service perception, compare the representatives’ perception, report the differences, and provide management with coaching suggestions. CSP provides the coaching materials needed by management to develop and align the CSR’s skills and perceptions for a consistent customer experience by all and to all.

  It is important to recognize that each customer and business culture requires a unique set of values and business behaviors to succeed. We will measure the behavior of your most effective CSRs, and create a “Benchmark” (Best-of-Breed) profile of them. You will then coach existing staff and hire into that Benchmark profile; thereby coaching and hiring people that share the same, ability to communicate, problem solve, display behavior and retain passions for customers; developing and getting the right people to deliver your customer experience!

• Phase II – Customer Retention– Your first business is to keep and serve your existing customers; called customer retention. Nurture and keep your customers with valuable customer service training and customer service tips. Here are some innovative ideas:
• Create "wow" customer experiences. Learn how to create amazing customer service experiences that increase customer retention and generate profitable results with easy to use actionable "how to" ideas, strategies, tips, and concepts. Often times, simply having an enthusiastic CSP’s voice can create the “wow” effect without incurring additional cost.
• Create loyalty and trust. Customer service is about reliability and it's about relationship. It's about trust. It's about quality of your product and service, but even more it's about the quality of your service before, during and long after the sale. Learn how simply changing a few choice words can diffuse a tense or unhappy situation and instead create a loyal and happy customer.
• Increase customer retention. It is incredibly expensive to lose customers and spend your money acquiring new customers. "Invisible Profits" is a customer service book designed to teach you to anticipate your customer's expectations and keep them for life. Even better, they'll spread the word about what a great business you have and customers will flock to your door - there's nothing better than good word of mouth marketing.
• Whether your organization is big or small, retail, industrial, internet, or home-based business, it all boils down to having customer service skills that enable you to create a profitable and lucrative customer service experience.
• Phase III – Change implementation - Our assessment and analysis will result in recommendations for change that will reduce alignment gaps and release the performance potential of your organization. Some changes are fairly simple and take relatively little time to implement. Others can be dramatic and require significant planning and time to achieve. In either case we will provide a roadmap to higher performance tailored to your organization, your processes, and your customers’ experience. The roadmap will include exactly what must change, what the change will achieve, and how the change should be pursued. In summary, Craft Strategies will help you identify signs of trouble, make the needed assessments, define the roadmap for the future and enable you to turn your Customer Service organization into a successful and productive customer service experience.

• VALUE PROPOSITION

  A commonly accepted definition of Business Continuity Management (BCM) is, “the development of strategies, plans and actions that provide protection or alternate modes of operation should your enterprise experience an interruption”. Craft Strategies LLC believes it is a much more powerful tool. We are convinced that the true value of business continuity planning is its usefulness in keeping you on track to realize your business objectives.

  Craft Strategies LLC creates BCM value by first focusing Executive’s attention on the fundamental processes and people that make up their business. Gathering quantative and qualitative data about “What we do” and “Who does what we do”, can have a profound impact on several other key business questions. For example, “How does this knowledge affect where we want to go as an enterprise?” and “What do we need to do about the effects to our business plan of not being able to do the most critical things using the most critical talent?” There is much more to Business Continuity than plan building and testing. The more consideration given by executive management to continuity strategy development, the more likely it is that recovery investments made will be both cost effective and useful when it comes to maintaining viability during a business interruption.

  APPROACH Even within the same industry, business continuity strategies differ due to unique long term business strategies, Management’s risk appetite, and their response to the market in which they operate. We have experience in developing practical, cost-effective strategies that can be developed into executable plans for your specific business environment. Our approach draws from experience in a variety of industries and aligns with your investment in other pressing business strategy, regulatory and compliance issues, including the unique nature of the current economic environment. Our approach is business-oriented and based on the risks and impacts relevant to an organization’s key business processes and the people supporting them. Backup strategies alone, just aren’t enough anymore. Our planning focuses on the evaluation of those people, processes, technology and data that are vital to your operation. Craft Strategies’ Business Continuity Management Strategies are strengthened by the use of Certified Business Continuity Professionals (CBCPs) throughout the lifecycle of our engagements.

  WHAT WE DELIVER • Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis • Recovery Strategy Development • Business Recovery Plan and IT Disaster Recovery Plan Documentation • Crisis Management Plan Development • Recovery Plan Testing • BCM Training Program Development • Overall BCM Program Assessment and Audit.

• Craft Strategies is dedicated to helping healthcare organizations develop skills, create processes and implement technology that deliver safe and efficient services to the benefit of patients, physicians and providers. Our excellence strategies are customized to meet your objectives. We implement these strategies in a hands-on fashion, working side by side with your associates. This approach quickly provides visible and measurable success, while developing the skills of your associates.

Approach:

• Phase I – Get the right people involved - Improving sustainable revenue first requires that you have the right people involved and recognize that each healthcare process and culture requires a different thinking style and set of behaviors to be optimally effective. Using our assessment tools, we will measure the behavior of your best talent, and create a “Benchmark” profile of them. You will then hire into that Benchmark profile; thereby hiring people that share successful thinking styles, behavior and are interested in what they do.
• Phase II – Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement - Lean is a relentless organizational focus on eliminating any non value added consumption of resources. Non value added, in the context of Lean Training, is defined as anything that the patient would not be willing to pay for if given the choice. With this brief definition of Lean Training in mind we can immediately see that:
• Lean drives organization-wide patient focus.
• Lean challenges any consumption of resources, whether it be labor, materials or otherwise, if there is no benefit to the patient
• Lean provides a mechanism to hone organizational performance for the benefit of patients, physicians and the healthcare system itself

The Six Sigma strategy drives a relentless focus upon eliminating errors in processes. Healthcare organizations face not only liability and compliance risk due to the many errors being generated every day, but additionally, labor inefficiencies, which rise dramatically as a result of repetitious inspection and rework.

Studies indicate that up to 98,000 patients die annually due to medical errors. Other Studies show that the probability of preparing an error-free healthcare claim, with no rework required, is as low as 5% for most healthcare providers.

• Phase III – Revenue Cycle Services - the revenue cycle presents a large opportunity to change the financial outcome of the organization. While revenue cycles have been improved incrementally over the years largely via scattered implementation of technology solutions, we have proven that a holistic revenue cycle management approach will increase net operating margins of provider organizations by up to 7%. This approach has been developed in partnership with healthcare provider organizations and is now available to revenue cycle leaders wanting to change the financial impact of their revenue cycle.

Benefits:

• Measurable cost reduction
• Cash flow conversion speed increase, increasing cash and reducing cost of capital
• Productivity increases of 25-50%
• Error reduction of 50%+
• Raw material consumption reduction
• Supply chain cost reduction
• Inventory reduction
• Obsolescence reduction
• Logistics cost reduction
• Inventory holding cost reduction
• Supply chain cost reduction
• Cash flow volatility reduction
• Measurable revenue increase
• Throughput increase of 20-50% with no additional resource requirements
• Obsolescence reduction
• Logistics cost reduction
• Measurable margin increase
• Service portfolio rationalization
• Patient satisfaction increase
• Wait time reduction
• Clinical
• Business process
• Billing quality increase
• Establishment of service excellence processes and principles
• Advanced
• Business process
• Physician satisfaction increase
• Associate satisfaction & skill increase

Healthcare organizations of all sizes have a mountain of regulation that keeps on in-creasing as the federal government, states and even industry groups thrust more rules and standards in an effort to protect pa-tients, mitigate abuses and drive organiza-tions to improve quality while reducing over-utilization and unnecessary care. In addition to healthcare specific regulation, there is the addition of various tax, payroll, human re-sources, privacy, consumer fraud and corporate governance compliance issues that can make just navigating all the issues more than a full time job. Large healthcare organizations have compliance departments with an entire team focusing on noth-ing but constant review, education and audit of compliance issues. Smaller organi-zations do their best to address compliance risk within their means, taking a stance driven on policies and procedures but usually lacking on visibility on the reality of their compliance risks. Both scenarios are problematic in that changes in or addi-tions to regulations such as those required in ARRA legislation will require organi-zations to reinvest time and effort into their compliance programs.

Craft Strategies Healthcare takes compliance as an opportunity to continually monitor processes and controls. Compliance can become more a matter of contin-ual process improvement with controls in place to monitor staff adoption of stan-dards and practices and process performance metrics. We blend Lean for Health-care, Incident and Risk Management, Compliance Management, and Human Capital Management solutions to create an integrated approach to achieving compliance and managing risk in organizations large and small. We offer this integrated solu-tion through our relationship based advisory and risk monitoring service that in-cludes a secure web based knowledge and learning management system. Through the blending of people, process and technology we achieve compliance as a by-product of managing the daily operations of your organization.

If Change Was Easy, Why Is Everyone Talking To Themselves?

As a healthcare leader, you realize that in the current era of shrinking reimburse-ments, increasing regulation, pressure to improve outcomes and restricted access to capital that changing the status quo is no longer an option, but a matter of survival. Many organizations that have invested in cultural and change transformation efforts have found that many of their efforts have paid off, but only for a while. Sustainable cultural improvement and change manage-ment requires more than the latest manage-ment trends and buzzwords, but a genuine C-level commitment to model transpar-ent communication and empowered accountability among leadership and staff.

Craft Strategies Healthcare Practice brings seasoned experts in cultural and change governance to re-connect CxO’s all the way down to their line staff and direct cus-tomers to truly engage and align, instill trust and integrity and unleash the hidden passion for achieving the joint goals for all stakeholders in your healthcare enter-prise. Our strategic partnerships with leading healthcare focused thought leaders can further your efforts by providing practical tools and needed mentorship sup-port for your key initiatives in patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction, provider relationships, measured quality improvement, patient safety, regulatory compliance and technology-enabled process transformation.

Our goal is to help you create a unified strategy to manage these multiple and often competing initiatives under one governance framework that helps you establish the right metrics of success, create clear communication channels to avoid surprises, and empower and reward the success of your leadership and expert teams.

Many healthcare organizations are facing hard choices due to diminishing marginal returns on many programs and tight cash and capital. Due to the tough economic times, patients services and plan membership have declined im-pacting revenue for payers and providers alike. CxO’s are challenged with making difficult cuts while trying to de-termine the long-term implications of such a move. In this situation, a thorough review of your programs, ser-vices, assets, and resources is essential to identify which are critical to long-term performance and which are non-essential to your organization’s bottom line.

Craft Strategies Healthcare helps you identify cost con-tainment strategies that begin with a goal of creating long-term value. We first involve the right people and provide the guidance in performing a joint assessment of key services and resources that have a direct context towards strategic revenue goals. Using this baseline, we pro-duce for you a balanced and ranked portfolio of services and resources that are potential candidates for containment. In addition, we can benchmark your expendi-tures in these areas with a unit of service method for both internal trends as well as against your peers.

Upon identification and mutual agreement of key opportunities, we then bring our expert network to bear to assess consolidation and re-negotiation opportunities. In addition, we can bring strategic sourcing options into play with the goal of main-taining or improving on existing service levels while reducing ongoing operational costs. Our experience spans cost containment and optimization ranging from mar-keting and media buys, labor and productivity improvement, supply chain reduc-tions, benefits and insurance optimization, vendor contract negotiations , IT staff-ing and voice/data network costs and overall business process outsourcing pro-gram implementation.

With all the challenges inherent in the balancing act that is healthcare finance, it is often hard to keep a pulse on what the real issues are that impede cashflow. Many healthcare institutions have addressed the move to HIPAA and have leveraged technology and workflow enhancements into their revenue cycle to improve cashflow performance. However, a remaining theme that resonates through many organiza-tions is the the lack of meaningful feedback and trending on revenue performance issues prior to receivable problems becoming bigger. With the constant changes in revenue cy-cle issues, this can be a challenge for a revenue cycle pro-fessional to foresee. Most traditional measures for health-care revenue cycle such as days in A/R, total cash received and cash as a percent of aging categories fail to discount accounting treatment, utilization variation and payor mix changes.

Craft Strategies Healthcare offers a revenue cycle improvement approach that is service based and uses a balanced scorecard strategy that is fundamentally based on an account and encounter level service issue resolution. The result is continu-ous improvement driven by metrics focused exclusively on the effectiveness of your revenue cycle team to consistently resolve account and encounter level reve-nue service issues in a timely and appropriate manner. These metrics are mutually exclusive of accounting treatments, utilization variations and payor mix changes. In addition, we can provide and integrate our unique SaaS based activity tracking, is-sue management and knowledge base platform that brings the best practices from world-class customer service and technical service management organizations with an adapted approach for the healthcare revenue cycle. The goal is to assist you in creating transparent and empowered revenue cycle team communication with ac-cess to group problem solving and real-time policy development to address emerg-ing or recurring revenue issues. Our methodology allows you to free yourself from the constraints of “canned workflow” systems that require constant modeling and re-configuration to optimize your process. In addition, you get metrics that truly reflect revenue cycle performance. In a meaningful way that allow you to continu-ally adapt and improve to industry issues.

• The pluralistic character of American higher education and the variety of missions and supporting collegiate structures that support it provides challenges that cannot be overcome without the hands-on experience of seasoned professionals. Craft Strategies’ (Craft) consultants bring to each engagement a practical, hands-on understanding of higher-education management. All of our professionals have held faculty or senior administrative positions in institutions of higher education. Because we have a “hands-on,” understanding of the cultural and organizational nuances that shape the decisions and policies of our clients, we can address the issues of your organization quickly and efficiently.

  Craft provides to America’s colleges and universities creative and cost effective solutions to the financial, operational, and strategic problems being faced today. As specialists in higher education, we understand the need for resource management and fund development in today’s challenging economic times. We use methodologies that focus on analysis to help colleges and universities make the best use of their people, financial, and technological resources. We deliver results on-time, within budget, functionally complete and culturally functional.

Service Offerings:

• Admissions/Recruitment
• Retention programs
• Business information
• Career services
• Scheduling
• Fund development
• Project management
• Regulatory reporting
• Public relations
• Student information systems
• Training & development
• Marketing strategies
• Special events
• Government sponsorships

• The root of both Lean and Six Sigma reach back to the time when the greatest pressure for quality and speed were on manufacturing. Lean rose as a method for optimizing automotive manufacturing; Six Sigma evolved as a quality initiative to eliminate defects by reducing variation in processes in the semiconductor industry. It is not surprising that the earliest adopters of Lean Six Sigma arose in the service support functions of manufacturing organizations like GE Capital, Caterpillar Finance, and Lockheed Martin

  Lean Six Sigma for services is a business improvement methodology (details on DMAIC) that maximizes shareholder value by achieving the fastest rate of improvement in customer satisfaction, cost, quality, process speed, and invested capital. The fusion of Lean and Six Sigma improvement methods is required because:

  • Lean cannot bring a process under statistical control
  • Six Sigma alone cannot dramatically improve process speed or reduce invested capital
  • Both enable the reduction of the cost of complexity

  Ironically, Six Sigma and Lean have often been regarded as rival initiatives. Lean enthusiasts note that Six Sigma pays little attention to anything related to speed and flow, while Six Sigma supporters point out that Lean fails to address key concepts like customer needs and variation. Both sides are right. Yet these arguments are more often used to advocate choosing one over the other, rather than to support the more logical conclusion that we blend Lean and Six Sigma.

How it is that Six Sigma and Lean are complementary...

• Six Sigma
• Emphasizes the need to recognize opportunities and eliminate defects as defined by customers
• Recognizes that variation hinders our ability to reliably deliver high quality services
• Requires data driven decisions and incorporates a comprehensive set of quality tools under a powerful framework for effective problem solving
• Provides a highly prescriptive cultural infrastructure effective in obtaining sustainable results
• When implemented correctly, promises and delivers $500,000+ of improved operating profit per Black Belt per year (a hard dollar figure many companies consistently achieve)
• Lean
• Focuses on maximizing process velocity
• Provides tools for analyzing process flow and delay times at each activity in a process
• Centers on the separation of "value-added" from "non-value-added" work with tools to eliminate the root causes of non-valued activities and their cost
  • The 8 types of waste/non-value-added work:
    • Wasted human talent - Damage to people
    • Defects - "Stuff" that's not right & needs fixing
    • Inventory - "Stuff" waiting to be worked
    • Overproduction - "Stuff" too much/too early
    • Waiting time - People waiting for "Stuff" to arrive
    • Motion - Unnecessary human movement
    • Transportation - Moving people & "Stuff"
    • Processing Waste - "Stuff" we have to do that doesn't add value to the product or service we are supposed to be producing
• Provides a means for quantifying and eliminating the cost of complexity

The two methodologies interact and reinforce one another, such that percentage gains in Return on Investment Capital (ROIC%) are much faster if Lean and Six Sigma are implemented together.

In short, what sets Lean Six Sigma apart from its individual components is the recognition that you cannot do "just quality" or "just speed," you need a balanced process that can help an organization focus on improving service quality, as defined by the customer within a set time limit.

Approach: DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control)

• Using DMAIC to Improve Service Processes
• No matter how you approach deploying improvement teams in your organization, they will all need to know what is expected of them. That is where having a standard improvement model such as DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) is extremely helpful. It provides teams with a roadmap. DMAIC is a structured, disciplined, rigorous approach to process improvement consisting of the five phases mentioned, where each phase is linked logically to the previous phase as well as to the next phase.