One day of a senior consultant

Monday, St. Petersburg

I am getting up and I look at the snow-covered Nevsky Prospekt from a window at the 8th floor of a hotel in the centre of the historical St. Petersburg. It is minus 10 degrees Celsius but the street is already very busy. I check my e-mails and the quality of a proposal for a client which I received from a colleague who works at our Prague office.

Breakfast with the client, it is a genuinely international meeting. The executive director is a Dane, the production director a Bulgarian who lives in Germany and the sales director is a Russian. During our breakfast we communicate in English, German and Russian, the discussion is equally manifold regarding its content as it is the time of the deepest economic recession in the Russian Federation.

Transfer by car to the production site which is located 60 km from St. Petersburg. On the way we discuss about the unique concept of production control in the system of DC VISION LEAN LEADERSHIP.

In cooperation with our client’s employees we analyze production processes, production teams and we show videos with examples of production optimization in other similar production sites..

Lunch in a Russian canteen. Pirozhki and chai are served for free also the drivers who come to pick up products produced by the factory. It is meant as a motivation for the drivers to drive carefully on the damaged roads and to get the products to the distribution centers in the highest quality. A good idea which I surely will tell my colleagues in Central Europe.

I connect with our backoffice in Opava through Skype and submit checklists for workshops at our clients’ premises which will be carried out in the second half of this week in the Czech Republic. At the same time I assign the task of transferring the data acquired during the morning session in the production into transparent graphs and tables.

The second phase of measuring and analyses in the production. We discuss with the client the map which reviews the flow of value added in technology and the preparation of the presentation for the management team.

Presentation and discussion with the management, explanation of DC VISION’s methods to the production engineers and those who are responsible for production planning.

Return to St. Petersburg. During the drive I have approx. 8 phone calls with clients in the Czech Republic and Germany. As the clock over there displays 2 hours less it is the right time to agree upon meetings for the next week.

Short walk through the city centre with a coffee at a traditional Russian coffeehouse, connection of the smart phone to the wi-fi site and a short check of e-mails.

Dinner with a potential client from the construction domain, he got a recommendation from our Russian client, thus the discussion is the more pleasant and we agree upon our next commission in St. Petersburg for our team. I find out that the client is fond of golf and so I invite him at our event which takes place at the end of summer in Marienbad. Czech spas are like a magnet for Russian citizens and so my invitation is gladly accepted.

Per Skype I talk with my loved ones back home, both children have already finished their homework and so we exchange some photographs and I get to know what is new at home where I will arrive in three days. I have to be quick because their favorite serial on TV is about to start.

I read the electronic version of our international study which my colleague from the European Competence centre Strategy and Market Impact sent me. It is an interesting lecture before going to bed. This week I still have to go to Pardubice and Dresden because I do not want to work during the weekend. Then I will devote to my family and especially my children whom I bought some sweets today …