For two days, Ross Peterson and Nolan Drake, a colleague at Effective Management, Inc., conduct interviews throughout Universal Products. The broad subject of the interviews is planning and control.

They talk to the general manager, senior management team, middle managers, and individuals on the shop floor. Every function within the company is covered: sales, marketing, planning, manufacturing, finance, engineering, project management, customer service, purchasing, order entry, and master scheduling.

Ross and Nolan frequently team together to work with clients. They have complementary experience and personalities. Before joining EMI three years ago, Nolan held supply management positions at two different companies, both of which implemented integrated enterprise management processes.

Nolan and Ross frequently joke about how the names of these processes change as marketers attempt to gain name recognition. In the 1980s, the term was manufacturing resource planning, or MRP II. In the 1990s, the buzzword was enterprise resource planning, or ERP. But to Nolan and Ross, it really is organized common sense.

Ross has spent more than fifteen years working with the executive teams of companies to implement organized common sense, and he likes to joke that he has the gray hair to show for it. Nolan, in his early thirties, has jet black hair with no traces of gray. Ross tells him that is because he has only been at this organized common sense business for eight years, five years as a practitioner and three years as a consultant.

Ross and Nolan work well in tandem. Ross interviews the...