About West River
West River of Oakwood, Virginia, is a leader in custom-built, custom-designed conveyor systems and terminal group packages. The company provides engineered and pre-engineered conveyor terminal packages including belt drives, take up units, tail sections, discharge/transfer stations, belt starters, and other unique fabrications. West River also offers a wide range of conveyor components, such as motors, reducers, fluid couplings, belt rollers, pulleys, bearings, heavy conveyor sprockets, bull gears, backstops, chains, and more.
The Challenge
West River faced a challenge as they were planning their future long term growth strategies and recognized a need for a plan to transition leadership to ensure sustainability and business continuity over the long term. The objectives were to visualize strategic execution deliverables, define the total level of effort, schedule, and costs over the strategic execution period, and unify leadership by communicating essential organizational dependencies in a quantitative, fact based, and logical manner. To achieve these goals, West River partnered with GENEDGE, part of the MEP National Network™, for facilitation of business growth planning and strategic transformation.
“Working with GENEDGE helped our management group reinforce our commitment to sustainability and long-term growth. Bringing everyone together to develop a plan helped us mitigate our risks and work towards the identified necessary activities that must be done in order to grow our business. Sam and Mike were wonderful in helping facilitate the difficult conversations and we are appreciative of our time with, and knowledge gained from GENEDGE.”
— Jessica Savage, Chief Strategic Officer
The Results
Over a two-day period, a GENEDGE subject matter expert engaged with West River’s leadership team to dissect and refine their strategic objectives. The process involved extracting actionable blocks of activity necessary to achieve the company’s goals, distinguishing operational tasks from strategic investments, and challenging leadership to pinpoint where resources should be invested or divested to focus on strategic endeavors over operational activities. This effort resulted in the development of a strategic roadmap to ensure organizational alignment and long-term viability.
Throughout the facilitation, a running risk register documented market, technical, schedule, cost, and quality gaps, while a resource allocation table and cost estimates were calculated quarterly for financial planning purposes. Despite the inherent uncertainty in strategy, the content was created with a 70 to 80% confidence level, acknowledging an acceptable error rate in cost and revenue forecasting. As successive projects unfolded, the error rate diminished as facts became clearer. The project successfully helped to establish West River plans for future growth and enabled confidence to execute transition from one leadership structure to another, enabling the owner to begin the retirement process.