Services

What we are actually selling

It helps to say this first, because it shapes everything below. We are engineers, but we work like professors with a practice: the deliverable is not a report or a redesigned line so much as a team that can see its own operation clearly and keep improving it after we have gone. Results come quickly — throughput, changeover time, on-time delivery — but we treat them as the evidence that the change has taken, not as the point of it. An operation that hits its numbers for a quarter and then reverts has not been served. The clients we serve best are the ones who want the change to outlast us.

The sequence

A first conversation, and a look at the floor. Most engagements open with a thirty-minute conversation about what you are seeing and what we have done in similar operations, followed — if it is useful — by a diagnostic walk through the operation itself. The diagnostic is complimentary and carries no obligation. Its purpose is to locate the constraint and to let both sides find out whether the work fits. If it does not, we will say so, and try to point you toward who might help instead.

A single kaizen event. Most transformation clients begin here: one five-day event in which six to ten people from the operation map a process, find the constraint, redesign the work, and stand the new process back up to run the following Monday. A ninety-day sustainment roadmap carries the follow-up items; after ninety days the list is deliberately scrapped, so that what could not be done quickly does not become a permanent burden. A single event is the cleanest way to see how we work without committing to a programme.

A department-by-department transformation. The bulk of our work. Events proceed through the operation one department at a time, at a rhythm of roughly one every six weeks, always targeted at the current system bottleneck rather than wherever activity is easiest to schedule. The cadence is deliberate: systems thinking engages the whole value stream each time, and back-to-back events fatigue an organisation faster than they improve it. Over several months the operation is reworked end to end, by the people who run it.

Fractional Lean Officer. For operations that want a continuing Lean programme rather than event-by-event work, we hold the function on a retainer: oversight of up to ten in-flight improvement projects, weekly office hours for the project champions clearing roadblocks, discounted events and discounted University of Nevada, Reno Green Belt certifications layered on top, and standing access between visits. It is, in effect, a head of Lean held at a level of experience a single internal hire at that salary band generally cannot reach — a point worth its own section below.

If you are weighing an internal Lean hire

Sooner or later a growing operation asks whether Lean should be brought fully in-house. It is a fair question, and we would rather help you think it through than argue against it. We would only reframe it: the decision is not consultant or employee but what structure most reliably sustains Lean gains five and ten years out. In Goldratt's The Goal, the consultant Jonah appears infrequently, asks a few disciplined questions, and leaves; the factory and its team own the insights. The catalyst outlasts the resident expert because the understanding belongs to the people who live with the process. That is the cadence we have come to advocate, and it is why an outside practitioner who carries problems between clients — importing what worked in one industry into another, standing outside your hierarchy to tell a room of senior experts what we actually see — can be harder to replace than it first appears.

If the decision is still open, we are glad to lay out both structures honestly. If you have already decided to hire, the more useful conversation is how to make that hire succeed — the working architecture between an internal lead and an outside practice is best settled before the person starts, not after, because the patterns that undermine these arrangements are structural rather than personal and can be designed out in advance. We mentor an internal lead from Green Belt through Black Belt under the credentialed UNR structure, give them the byline for the improvements we develop together, and stand above the work rather than alongside it. Their progression becomes the measure of the engagement.

We keep two short notes for leadership teams sitting with this decision — one on sustaining Lean over the long run, one on making an in-house lead succeed. We are happy to send them; see below.

Teaching, alongside the work

Running parallel to every engagement is a teaching ladder: a four-belt Lean curriculum (White, Yellow, Green, Black) taught through the University of Nevada, Reno, plus a one-day Advanced Leadership Academy for the executives who sponsor transformations. Capability built in the classroom and change made on the floor reinforce each other; a meaningful share of our clients first met us in Rishi's Green Belt class. The curriculum is described in full under Teaching.

How engagements are shaped, and what they cost

Two broad shapes, chosen by how continuous you want the work to be. Event work is bought as you need it, one kaizen at a time, with the ninety-day roadmap included — the lightest commitment, and a clean way to attach a return to a bounded intervention. A Fractional Lean Officer retainer holds the whole function continuously, with events and Green Belt certifications discounted underneath it; for most operations this lands below the fully loaded cost of a mid-level internal Lean hire while delivering a more senior practitioner. A bounded external engagement also produces a clean causal signal at budget time — the lift attaches visibly to the work — which is precisely when in-house programmes are most often cut. We are glad to talk specific figures in the first conversation, against the actual shape of your operation rather than a list price.

Where to begin

We do not talk anyone into starting. What we offer is a good way to start once you have decided you are going to — and two quiet ways in, depending on where you are.

If you would like to read before you talk, we are glad to share the two leadership notes we keep for teams sitting with this decision — Sustaining Lean Over the Long Run and Making an In-House Lean Lead Succeed. Tell us where to send them and both will be on their way.

If you would rather talk, the next step is a thirty-minute conversation about your operation and where you think the constraint lives. Book a conversation, or write to us directly at rishi@increaseeta.com with a paragraph or two about your situation — the more specific the better, since we read carefully before replying. Either way, there is no obligation and the diagnostic is complimentary. The fuller picture of how a first conversation goes is on the Engage page.