Welcome

At the Center for Competitive Change, we will help your company reach its maximum potential through our unique three tier approach of listening, learning, and understanding.

Listen

Every business is different. That is why we will start our relationship with your company by listening to your company’s problems and issues. Only through listening can we learn how to best suit the needs of your company. Every need, no matter how small, is important enough to make a difference in your company's performance.

Learn

Next, we partner with you in order to learn more about your company. Learning about your unique business and the problems it faces allows us to understand the best way to fix these problems to help you turn a greater profit. Our team is well-learned and has the experience, wisdom, and judgment that will assure that you are receiving the best possible solution to the challenges that your business faces.

Understand

Finally, by listening and learning about your company, we will be able to understand your situation so as to provide the best solutions to your unique problems The Center for Competitive Change has people who have the forethought, leadership, experience, and knowledge to understand what it takes to run a competitive company.

People

It has always been true that great work begins by having the best people then phenomenal work happens. This is true in how the Center for Competitive Change got to where we are today. Our team started with Carol Shaw who saw an opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to learn from the Japanese lean masters. From there, it has been all about performance.
Forethought. Carol Shaw is a full Professor in UD’s School of Engineering. She founded the Center in 1988 and grew it to outstanding levels. She identified the subject matter experts who helped design the course workshops and who became worldwide facilitators, authors and lecturers in lean and reliability. She provided the public venue and the client market for developing the Center’s reputation for leadership in lean learning and application. Not only does the Center lead the market in such Lean workshops as Lean Office, Lean Accounting, and Lean TPM, the Center also offers the only Lean workshops in Lean Metrics and Root Cause Analysis for people problems.
Leadership. This attribute is extremely important and Paul Piechota, the new Executive Director of the Center, brings this and other qualities to the team. His career spans many years with NCR and Texas Instruments where he learned and implemented business operations that have helped companies achieve new levels of success. He first came to the University of Dayton Research Institute in support of growing the Center for Leadership & Executive Development at the School of Business Administration. There, Paul helped the Center expand from 12 partners to 18 while instituting many new sales and marketing processes, as well as client retention plans.
Experience, Knowledge. Mr. Cash Powell came to the Center in 1998 after a career in manufacturing and managing his own consulting business. He writes client proposals, manages the lean improvement projects led by our facilitators and writes in Target magazine about successful lean companies.
Relationships, Confidence. In today’s fast-paced world where time is the common measurement, it is impossible to be all things to all people within one organization or on one team. It is critical to have strong and trustful relationships with alliances that can complement our expertise and overall service offerings to our clients. Recognizing this, The Center for Competitive Change staff and facilitators have been working together with our partners for our entire 20 years, building these strong relationships.

Productivity

Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort by the entire organization. Our capabilities and team of subject level experts are focused to support you the client with industry-specific, performance accelerator tools and services. With productivity maximized, waste will be minimized, costs will be optimized, and profit will peak. Our team will help you to increase productivity so your company will run at peak efficiency.
Training in new tools is a required strategy for company survival in this global environment. But training is just a line item in the HR budget if the tools are not vigorously applied to the workplace. Leaders of lean companies have learned that training is not just for the salaried professional anymore, but the key for changing the culture of the entire organization. For lean to take hold and yield the substantial savings in your facility, hourly associates must also be an integral part of the training activity so they can release their vast, on the job knowledge and experience to the continuous improvement culture you are striving to develop. Companies starting down the lean road will eventually learn that training is a requirement for ongoing improvements and a budgeted line item fixed-in-concrete not to be cut - ever.

The Center has provided state of the art training workshops in lean manufacturing, lean office and lean reliability since 1988. We give participants the depth of knowledge to go back and apply the learning to their workplace. Because our facilitators are highly skilled, hands on experts and not staff generalists, we bring more than just a surface awareness and definitions of terms.

Prepare your company with training for the present staff if you are just starting or as a base for new employees if you are well on the road. The Center presenters teach their workshops from problems participants bring to the classes and provide case histories of successful companies along with analytical tools they can take back to the workplace for application.

Competitive

The courses we offer focus on showing businesses how to operate locally while turning a profit on a global scale. The Center, along with Mainstream Consulting, is working with several companies who have applied the knowledge and kept the work in America. The Center for Competitive Change will provide you with the necessary tools and ideas to maximize productivity in order to develop a cutting edge over the competition. Competitive companies have decreased costs and increased capability resulting in increased revenues and market share.