Our story started in 2016. It began to give real-world know-how to businesses who wanted consulting services without the consulting rhetoric or the latest management fad.
We understand business and we understand why traditional consulting has limited traction and results. A large part is due to the story of business itself:
Todays current business operating methodologies are more than a century old.
They originated from Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford at the start of the 1900’s with a focus on task and functional hierarchies.
After WWII, as manufacturing around the globe accelerated (along with competition), quality management became an additional tool.
The Taylor/Ford ideas and the quality management ideas are not mutually exclusive. They form a continuum that has morphed into a hodgepodge collection of disconnected business process management ideas that conflict and fight for limelight.
It wasn’t until 1967 that empirical evidence showed that businesses that had better inter-departmental coordination performed better than those that didn’t.
However, this finding was overshadowed by the raft of ideas, tools and gurus that perpetuated the task, hierarchy and production based focus, thus reinforcing the original management ideas from the early 1900’s, and so this critically important finding remained in the realm of academia.
It was only a few short years ago in 2015, that the first study looked at validating how internal business integration (the modern variant of the 1967 inter-departmental coordination) can affect financial performance by using the company’s own financial data in the analysis. Indeed, businesses had become far more complex and required a way to integrate across functions and operations in order to produce financial outcomes.
Now, truly ground-breaking new research from the last six years has been carried out to shatter the historical myopic business operating approach. This current research cuts-through theory to deliver real-world results that determines HOW internal business processes should be built that will DIRECTLY move the four financial levers of cost, revenue, asset efficiency and working capital. In other words, improving both the Balance Sheet and the P&L by whole-of-business integration. This is the Internal Business Productivity (‘IBP’) technique.
This is the future of business management. This breakthrough came only as a result of research being conducted not by academics but a practicing senior business executive. With multiple country, industry and company experience over two decades, seeing the same flawed operating methodology employed, proved the need for change and sparked doctoral research to fill this gap and deliver a model for business that aligns, delivers and removes extraneous noise.
In 2023, Norfolk Solutions secured the exclusive deployment of the Internal Business Productivity (‘IBP’) surveying, statistical analysis and financial and mathematical modelling technique that directly delivers internal integration which improves financial performance.