Alula: A CLG Company
 

Performance

 

Improving performance starts with changing behaviors.

Performance success is measured in many ways, but virtually all performance measurement can be linked to one variable—human behavior.

Organizational performance can be directly linked to the business-critical behaviors of individuals—from organizational leadership, to team leaders, to team members.

ALULA’s approach to performance improvement and optimization is different. Our deep understanding of human behavior allows us to help organizations identify and improve gaps in behavior that positively influence business results. 

ALULA has over 25 years of experience helping clients solve their most significant performance challenges in these areas:

Becoming a High-Performing Organization

In today’s lightning-fast, ever-changing, and sometimes ambiguous business environment, it has become more challenging for companies to achieve and sustain high performance. When companies struggle to achieve industry-leading levels of performance, many times it is not for lack of effort but more because of the inability to uncover and address critical gaps that jeopardize their ability to achieve and sustain high performance.

ALULA’s research into what contributes to organizations achieving high performance has uncovered four key elements of high-performing organizations. These elements are part of a framework that provides companies an evidence-based analysis of their organization’s strengths and gaps in the four areas that are proven to be essential to high-performing organizations. The framework also can be used to analyze individual strengths and gaps often found in leadership groups.

The data and insights gained via this framework provide a solid foundation for identifying and enabling the business-critical behaviors required for individuals and organizations to grow and achieve exceptional performance.

Performance and Work Process Improvement

Business and functional operations leaders are under constant pressure to consistently meet short-term goals while balancing long-term targets. From improving customer service, cost management, productivity, and safe operations to increasing employee engagement, revenue growth, and profitability, people have an ongoing and unshakable challenge to maximize return on investment.

ALULA works directly with leaders to advance essential strategic goals to uncover gaps, build team alignment, and identify, deploy, and measure the business-critical behaviors that most influence performance and work process improvement targets.

Our experience includes helping clients solve their most significant performance and work process challenges in these areas:

  • Reliability

    Managing the reliability of facilities and equipment required to run 24/7/365 is an extremely complex challenge with multiple variables and risks. ALULA works with business operations leaders to uncover and address gaps in reliability performance. The factors impacting reliability vary greatly, but all have one thing in common . . . individual behavior. Our approach is different in that we help to positively change and sustain individual behavior at essential touchpoints to achieve reliable performance targets.
  • Safety and Environmental Compliance

    Workforce safety and environmental compliance are always top priorities. ALULA works with business operations leaders and safety and environmental professionals, to help identify compliance gaps, achieve goals, and create injury- and incident-free workplaces.
  • Cost Management

    Cost management isn’t achieved on a spreadsheet. ALULA helps organizations improve cost management performance by uncovering and repairing performance gaps where they exist, in areas like line operations, change-over time, fleet utilization, energy costs, and equipment efficiency.
  • Productivity

    Workforce productivity performance universally influences business profitability, growth, and success. ALULA assists clients in defining productivity gaps and developing individual and workforce improvement practices to produce more positive results in daily production goals and long-term production performance targets.
  • Operational Discipline

    Effective operational discipline has the ability to improve the safety, execution, and performance of critical work practices across the entire organization. Operational discipline is especially important where hazardous materials are involved, or dangerous operations are performed. ALULA works to expose gaps in operational discipline performance and provide solutions that advance workforce knowledge and inspire actions that deliver performance excellence.
  • Forecasting

    There is nothing worse than missing earnings estimates, having too much or not enough product, or missing a sales target. Accurate forecasting in your business can be the difference between success and failure. Establishing an accurate measurement that can be used to guide leaders in their planning, goal-setting, and execution is instrumental in steering companies toward achieving results. Our work with executives, senior leaders, and mid-level leaders provides a streamlined approach to accelerate improvements in the process and accuracy of forecasting. We start with helping them understand the forecasting-related performance gaps that exist. When gaps are agreed upon, we then work with leaders to align, identify, deploy, and measure the business-critical behaviors associated with accurate forecasting.

Salesforce Effectiveness

The salesforce is typically the engine that drives revenue, but with shifting buyer behavior, channel disruption, technological advances, and multiplying competitors, even companies that have invested in modern sales models and the best sales training and coaching may not be seeing improvement in their salesforce effectiveness.

Beyond market circumstances, there are often under-leveraged strengths and unidentified gaps within a sales organization that traditional performance improvement methodologies won’t uncover or address.

Our approach to improving our client’s salesforce effectiveness includes a comprehensive, evidence-based analysis of their organization’s strengths and gaps in four core areas we define as cornerstones—those critical areas that are proven to be essential to high-performing organizations. We then use the data to help sales leaders identify, deploy, and measure the critical actions that will help individual’s grow, teams excel, and organizations soar to higher levels of sales performance.

Turnaround Planning and Execution

Turnarounds in continuous operating process plants, such as refineries and petrochemical processing plants, are complicated and costly events where downtime equals lost revenue and increased cost.

ALULA works with operations and maintenance leaders, plant managers, facility leaders, and turnaround teams to strengthen the execution of their turnaround strategy, manage the critical details, and achieve their desired business outcomes.

Who we are, what we do and how we do it at ALULA

Case Studies: performance

Operational Discipline

ALULA helped a Fortune 10 refinery reverse a severe decline in reliability, preventing the loss of millions in production.

Challenge

  • In a single year, this aging refinery endured 30 unscheduled shutdowns—averaging one every 10 days—costing $80 million, with nearly half caused by human error.

Solution

  • ALULA used our proprietary methodology to pinpoint behaviors critical to reliability

Results

  • Reliability metrics improved dramatically: “incidents” dropped sharply, lost profit opportunity plummeted nearly 40%, and unplanned shutdowns dropped to zero by Year 4 and remained low

Case Studies: performance

Productivity

ALULA helped pharmaceutical giant dramatically improve critical vaccine availability and revenue

Challenge

  • A packaging bottleneck hindered availability of critical vaccines—hurting patients, doctors, the company, and investors

Solution

  • ALULA used Behavioral Science and Lean Six Sigma to improve processes and culture, stabilize workforce, and coach 1:1 at all levels

Results

  • Broke packaging bottleneck, eliminated backlog, sharply improved culture and performance, and achieved $500M more available vaccines

Case Studies: performance

Turnaround Planning and Execution

ALULA used Performance Coaching to help major refinery reduce scope growth of “turnarounds” (planned maintenance shutdowns), saving $25M/year.

Challenge

  • Maintenance turnarounds happen every 2–5 years, last 10–50+ days, and require up to 3 years of detailed planning. Scope growth adds serious cost overruns and schedule disruptions, each day adding cost up to $1M, so the client was determined to control scope growth

Solution

  • The client engaged ALULA to use its behavioral expertise in process improvement and performance coaching to reduce scope growth

Results

  • Scope growth dropped 23% from the refinery's average, saving $25 million/year.