Like many healthcare and senior living leaders, our partner faced rising costs and workforce strain.
Leadership wanted a scalable, evidence-based way to identify and address inefficiencies across operations in North America without increasing headcount or destabilizing the workforce. Experience has taught us that operations are shaped as much by people as by the infrastructure they depend on. When it comes to service delivery, policies, systems, spaces, and technologies shape what's possible and what isn't. Yet because this infrastructure operates largely in the background, leaders often experience its effects without ever seeing the conditions that create it. We needed to make the invisible visible, and meaningful. What we discovered made it clear that the greatest opportunities for improvement were not in changing team members' behavior, but in redesigning the operational infrastructure that supports them throughout service delivery. In doing so, the conversation shifted from improving efficiency alone to designing for both effectiveness and efficiency.
Translating operational intelligence into infrastructure
What we observed reframed the entire challenge. Leadership believed they had a workforce problem. We discovered they had an infrastructure problem masquerading as a workforce problem. Team members weren't slowing down service delivery. They were continually adapting to policies, systems, spaces, and technologies that no longer supported the realities of their work.
The implications of this insight were significant. The challenge was no longer about changing team members' behavior. It was about redesigning the infrastructure supporting them throughout service delivery.
To that end, we designed strategies to strengthen the policies, roles, systems, spaces, and technologies supporting associates throughout service delivery. Our strategy focused on five interconnected priorities.
Role Optimization Align responsibilities with expertise to reduce unnecessary role overlap, strengthen collaboration, and maximize the value of specialized expertise
Service Design Redesign workflows around the realities of everyday work rather than idealized processes, reduce unnecessary complexity, and limit task switching
Digital Integration Create a more connected operational ecosystem that improves visibility, coordination, communication, and flow
Technology Optimization Remove technology barriers that create friction, compromise operational data, and force unnecessary workarounds
Change Management Pair infrastructure optimization and implementation with leadership alignment and the necessary tools, training, motivation, and support to ensure associate adoption and continuous improvement
Together, these strategies created a practical roadmap for streamlining operations while strengthening service delivery, client experiences, and organizational capacity across North America.
Experiences strengthened. Capacity unlocked. More than $2.5M recovered.
More than a set of recommendations, the roadmap enabled leadership to prioritize with confidence, reduce execution risk, and scale improvements across North America.
Leadership left with more than answers. They left with a new way to understand and continuously improve service delivery. The result was not simply greater efficiency. It was a structurally stronger system. More specifically, the initiative:
Shifted the organization's focus from improving team member efficiency to strengthening the infrastructure that supports service delivery
Created unprecedented visibility into service delivery through animated operational maps and interactive analytics
Identified 458 leverage points across policies, roles, systems, spaces, and technologies
Identified multiple opportunities to recover capacity, including one initiative projected to yield ~$2.5M in annual savings through infrastructure redesign, without reducing headcount or placing additional strain on the workforce
Established a scalable framework for continuously improving operations across the broader North America
Equipped leadership with an Operational Intelligence Platform for ongoing analysis and decision-making
Operational innovation is not about asking people to do more with less. It is about designing the policies, roles, systems, spaces, and technologies that enable people—and the organizations they serve—to become their best and create better outcomes.
