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GGI Company ProfileGoldense Group, Inc. [GGI] is a consulting, market research, and education firm founded by Bradford L. Goldense in 1985 for the purpose of specializing in leading edge management techniques and technologies for line management functions. GGI focuses in process improvement and technology integration between product strategy, product management, R&D, engineering, product development, procurement, manufacturing, materials, and commercialization functions. Specializing in leading edge management practices requires an ongoing commitment to learn and stay ahead of the needs of our clients. This is accomplished through our proprietary research, monthly review of ninety journals and trade publications, leadership roles with professional and trade associations, speaking and networking in leading conferences, and application-focused consulting with high-tech, commercial, and defense clients pushing the adoption curve. Almost all of our clients are leaders in their industry or market segments. GGI HISTORYGGI initially focused on assisting clients with manufacturing process and productivity improvements including factory redesign, CIM, JIT, materials management, purchasing, vendor management, outsourcing, and product costing; and the integration of these factory and production activities with MRP/DRP/ERP business systems. At founding, it could be seen that the initial business focus would only sustain the corporation for a few years. By the end of the 1980s, opportunities to assist corporations to achieve break-through results in these areas would be largely realized. GGI began shifting our resources to focus on the challenges of the future that would define it as a corporation. As with many businesses, the initial focus of the company was an extension of the founder's immediate experience. Mr. Goldense had been raised in a private family engineering business and he too became an engineer. Upon graduation, he went to Texas Instruments where he was put in charge of starting up new TI factories after some time in design engineering. He directed a several-hundred person organization and multi-million dollar budgets to bring new facilities on-line. After receiving a master degree with a concentration in cost accounting, he joined Price Waterhouse Consulting where he installed MRP/DRP/ERP and factory automation control systems in several companies. These hands-on deep-skill experiences spanning all aspects of manufacturing and factory operations resulted in an invitation to join a team of people at the Index think tank. Index had just started developing the revolutionary management science of "business process engineering" or "reengineering." This McKinsey-style technology consultancy had a global reach and worked exclusively at the top of industry. As reengineering became mainstream and went global, numerous members of the creating team spun out. Mr. Goldense was hired as the global manufacturing industry and engineering-discipline subject matter expert for Index, and he remained so under GGI through ongoing contracts with Index until it was acquired in 1990. GGI MISSIONBy 1988, GGI had a regular backlog and three years of client references from industry leaders on several continents. GGI relocated and staffed a new office in Cambridge, Massachusetts with an eye towards what we believed would be the next great global initiatives - R&D productivity followed by Marketing productivity. We also believed that it would take several decades to fully achieve improvements in these more probabilistic disciplines that would enable GGI to have a lasting and purposeful corporate mission. R&D productivity was industry's next great quest. The immediate direction was set. The Cambridge office staff retooled to support consulting, market research, and education in R&D and product development. Some 50,000 pages of literature that generally represented the body of knowledge on R&D productivity at the time were analyzed. We studied the works of the business world thought leaders of the era. We achieved assembling and analyzing everything that was quantitatively known and understood about the performance of the business and technical processes of product management, R&D, and product development. We then began our own primary research. This knowledge-based quantitative approach immediately differentiated GGI in an emerging marketplace with many entrants. Our ability to design and build the labs and factories that produced new R&D products also differentiated us. Our first three years had resulted in several client case studies that hit public press. There were successful projects with Ford, Hoechst-Celanese, Vulcan, Guilford Mills, Bose, Sikorsky, and others. Our client base was impressed with the way GGI went about retooling itself and embraced our redirection. By 1990, our business mix had fully changed to product development. Our initial projects in 1988 placed us among the first advisory firms in the world to assist corporations in reducing product development time-to-market and to implement milestone-driven management processes. Today, GGI is recognized as one of the early and ongoing pioneers. GGI APPROACHThe firm is primarily a consultancy, with supporting businesses in research and executive education. Most consulting services are performed through an assembled team of outside experts tailored to the specific needs of the company and project. We have managed the business successfully with this model for twenty years and our experts work like a team. We will deliver your company a top-notch experience. Over 95% of our clients have hired us again. GGI also has alliance relationships with certain large consultancies that enable us to undertake mega-advisory projects with GGI as the prime. GGI in-house professionals manage our research and education businesses, and company operations. We typically work only with a few clients at a time. Our goal is not to be big, but to deliver high quality in-depth services aimed at achieving competitive advantages. Projects typically involve two to five highly seasoned professionals and are medium or long in duration. GGI has helped our clients post significant improvements in R&D financial performance that are recognizable on corporate income statements, balance sheets, and in stock prices. Success for GGI is to do a few projects quite right. Smaller client engagements also occur each year, but the base business is making lasting permanent improvements and that takes time. The market research and executive education businesses support those goals. We know where industry is in their adoption and application of practices, and therefore where our clients should be to stay or get ahead. On comprehensive projects, our clients allow us to become a temporary member of the top management team. Together, we then involve fifty to several hundred employees in highly defined focused roles aimed at achieving an overall improvement through the achievement of a number of focused improvements. Projects typically have ten to thirty-five individual elements that together result in a step-function improvement. Comprehensive GGI projects span product strategy and management, marketing, portfolio management, program and project management, all hardware and software engineering and scientific functions, technical support and documentation functions, DVT and production testing, alpha, beta, and production ramp-up, purchasing, operations, production, finance, commercialization functions. GGI projects span solid modeling and CAD/CAE/CAM systems, programming languages and tools and repositories, business information systems, the corporate intranet, product data management, and associated corporate data management systems. GGI has consulted to companies as small as $20 million having a single location as well as to over 200 of the "Fortune 1000" on four continents. GGI CAPABILITIESIn June 2001, GGI purchased a commercial facility and relocated our headquarters to Needham, Massachusetts after more than a dozen years in Cambridge. Needham is a historic town located along the well-known Charles River in eastern Massachusetts just west of Boston off major highway Route 95. Exit on Route 135 West and take your first left. We are down the road on the left. Our facility accommodates a dozen professionals and our industry-recognized library of research. Our facility aligns with GGI strategy to focus on a limited number of clients and provide them with a high quality service product each year. Since the mid-1990s, GGI has been recognized as one of the top small consultancies in R&D and product development in North America. GGI is among the top thought leaders in quantitative analysis and metrics for R&D and product development. Our fact-driven quantitative approach to identifying R&D productivity improvement opportunities, pioneered in the early 1990s, is now practiced by many companies and competitors. Our ability to improve both the creative-subjective and technical-quantitative processes of R&D and product development, our ability to understand the integration these activities with the other key business functions, our ability to coordinate and focus these dispersed technical and cross-functional resources to achieve tangible financial results, and our ability to measure both before and after continue to differentiate our services. |
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