About the Center

The Center for Competitive Change was formed to provide the educational tools needed to create learning organizations.  Our focus is manufacturing and we have discovered a key body of knowledge that underpins how to achieve competitive success.  This body of knowledge forms a foundation to prepare associates to fight waste and tap into millions of dollars of unrealized profits.  Creating knowledge workers who continually focus on improvement is the essence of what it means to be competitive.

Improvement is a wonderful word because it doesn’t fix blame, it’s self-fulfilling, and self-motivating and aligns management and the workforce toward a common goal.  Our courses are designed to capture and deliver the “how to’s” of competitive change in a way that blends theory with practice and incorporates an easy-to-implement, take-home methodology.

Continuous improvement practices define the philosophy of The Center for Competitive Change because they also encourage organizations to support human creativity in the work place.  Our curriculum teaches that continuous improvement enhances an organization’s financial position dramatically without resorting to artificial means that respond to monthly changes in the financial reports.  Knowledge is what empowers people to contribute ideas that guarantee long-term financial success.

The knowledge itself consists of a definable methodology developed into a series of courses that integrate the practices of kaizen or lean manufacturing, create a visual workplace and transition maintenance into a reliability function.  Each of these topics acts as a pillar of knowledge that represents a set of practices that must be adopted.  We present them as an interwoven management system that will stand the test of time.

While it is tempting to think that automation or integrated software programs are an alternative answer, they often bring complexity that adds cost.  Creating knowledge workers is a more cost effective approach because they add flexibility and simplicity and because they continue the learning cycle by providing that extra idea, that extra edge -- this is the ultimate goal, it’s how to go from just being able to compete to gaining a competitive advantage.