About Pinnacle Partners Inc.
For more than 30 years, Pinnacle Partners has been helping clients achieve profound, sustainable improvements in business performance. We focus on strategy-driven process improvement and breakthrough initiatives that directly impact bottom-line profitability, top-line growth, increased customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage. Our objective is to add velocity and magnitude to all performance improvement efforts. Our goal is to assist and enable our clients in competing as top quartile performers from an organization, operations, and financial perspective within their industry.
We believe that performance excellence is a journey achieved through vision and strategy deployment, combined with the necessary skills and discipline to enable the entire organization to contribute to meaningful change. While building on current strengths and success, we begin and develop our client relationships through:
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Understanding of and alignment on business strategic direction
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Translation of business strategy into key improvement and breakthrough opportunities applicable to each operation's value-chain and associated support processes
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Application of proven methodologies and strategies that ensure focused action for successful process improvement initiatives tied directly to predefined performance targets
In assisting our clients in achieving performance excellence, our intent is to transfer the skills and knowledge required to ensure that performance improvement becomes a way of life within the organization. To facilitate comprehensive and lasting transformation we concurrently develop the necessary mindsets, values, attitudes, and leadership skills that are required for your organization to "own" the implementation process.
Through strategic customer-supplier partnerships, Pinnacle Partners provides hands-on, applications-oriented coaching, consulting, and training that directly contributes to personal, team and business improvement. We approach client engagements from an integrated strategy of both organization and operations excellence that creates the greatest opportunity for profound and sustainable improvement in business performance. Our strategy-driven, process-focused, and project-enabled training, consulting and coaching have been successfully offered in the U.S. and international operations of organizations such as Motorola, The National Institute of Healthcare, Precision, Mead Packaging, IBM, The Social Security Administration, NASA, BellSouth, Louisiana-Pacific Corporation, Gallo Winery, International Paper, Copeland Corporation, and Metzeler Automotive Profile Systems.
If you are intent on producing strategic organizational excellence throughout your business,
Pinnacle Partners has the experience, resources, and capability to assist you in your journey.
Meet Our Managing Partners...
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Dr. Sophronia Ward is a Managing and Founding Partner of Pinnacle Partners, Inc. She has taught and implemented tools of Continual Improvement and Lean Six Sigma in a wide variety of industries since 1981. She is a statistician and Continual Improvement Expert who specializes in Lean Six Sigma and Statistical Process Control training, consulting, improvement facilitation and coaching. Currently her expertise is being utilized in many companies as their expert Lean Six Sigma “Senior Master Black Belt”. Black Belt, Green Belt, and Master Black Belt Training and Certification are her specialized areas of focus. She currently is providing training and coaching for Lean Six Sigma in over 30 different companies in 5 countries.
She combines her statistical expertise with team development to offer an integrated approach to implementing continual improvement systems. She has developed many workshop and seminar offerings including customized materials for client organizations. She also designed the popular SPC software package, improvit. In addition, she was a featured monthly columnist for Quality magazine under her headline, "Brain Teasers." This column was identified as the “most read” column for the magazine. Because of its popularity, BNP Media published the book, Brain Teasers: Real-World Challenges to Build your Manufacturing Skills. She also co-authored a chapter on “Six Sigma and Lean Implementation” in the McGraw-Hill published release, The Manufacturing Engineer’s Handbook and is a co-author of the book, Using Lean for Faster Six Sigma Results: A Synchronized Approach. She is a frequent keynote speaker for organizations and associations concerning quality, process improvement, Lean Six Sigma and other improvement related topics.
Dr. Ward received her B.S. in statistics from North Carolina State University and her Ph.D. in statistics from Virginia Tech. She was a professor at the University of Tennessee until 1984. Dr. Ward was one of the founders of the internationally recognized Institute for Productivity through Quality at the University of Tennessee and was a Senior Consultant Manager at Tennessee Associates, Inc. She is a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality, a member of the American Statistical Association, the Biometric Society and the Association for Psychological Type. She has her certification in Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and SMYLOG (a team dynamics survey instrument). |
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Sheila R. Poling is a Managing and Founding Partner of Pinnacle Partners, Inc. Her expansive professional experience includes owning/managing several consulting firms, working in operations management, product development, training materials and seminar development, marketing and sales, client interface, and customer satisfaction initiatives focused on business excellence with an emphasis on leadership and quality/process improvement.
A prolific presenter and author, Sheila has presented at over 25 conferences and coauthored multiple articles and books. These books include Productivity Press’, Using Lean for Faster Six Sigma Results: A Synchronized Approach and Mapping the Total Value Stream: A Comprehensive Guide to Production and Transactional Processes. BNP Media’s, Brain Teasers: Real-World Challenges to Build Your Manufacturing Skills, and also a chapter on “Six Sigma and Lean Implementation” in the McGraw-Hill published release, The Manufacturing Engineer’s Handbook. Additional books includes Customer Focused Quality and Building Continual Improvement: SPC for the Service Industry and Administrative Areas. Her latest book will be released in September 2012 and is titled, The Right Measures: The Story of a Company’s Journey to find the True Indicators of Its Success and Values.
She has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee, is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality, and a member of the American Management and American Marketing Associations. She is a member of International Who's Who, Sterling Who's Who and was named one of the "94 Meeting Planners to Watch in 1994" by ConventionSouth Magazine. She has had the privilege to study and work closely with many of the leaders in the process improvement, Six Sigma and Lean industries…including a long, professional relationship with Dr. W. Edwards Deming. |
To Access Articles in Quality Magazine written by Dr. Sophronia Ward, visit Brain Teasers.
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