St. Petersburg Consultant Focuses Management Techniques Honed at Motorola, Toyota

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. --- Sophisticated management techniques perfected at Google, Toyota, Ford and Motorola are helping Florida real estate developers cut costs, improve their delivery schedule and develop higher quality facilities for corporate and retail clients.

Rachel Elias Wein AIA (top right photo), who heads WeinPlus Real Estate Advisory Services in St. Petersburg, said she focuses techniques that power the world’s most successful corporations on real estate development processes with overwhelming results: a return on investment (ROI) that is more than 10 times its initial cost.

“Development is a very complex process and most developers are goal-oriented, not process-oriented,” Wein explained. “The application of some best practices developed by corporations such as Toyota and Motorola can result in dramatic cost reductions and tremendous efficiencies,” she said.

Wein is currently implementing a custom management program for one major Florida developer that adapts Lean Methodology techniques perfected by Toyota.

“Lean Methodology is a process that targets all expenditures and establishes whether or not they are essential to the company’s goal,” Wein explained.

“Elements which do not directly add value to the process are deemed waste and targeted for minimization or elimination,” she said.

Concurrently, Wein is implementing the Theory of Constraints developed by Israeli physicist Eliyahu Goldratt, now widely hailed as a corporate management guru.

“The Theory of Constraints focuses on improving business processes by targeting constraints---bottlenecks---and improving their capacity to produce,” Wein said.

Wein, a former development manager with the Sembler Company in St. Petersburg and senior associate with Ernst & Young’s Construction and Real Estate Advisory Services in Philadelphia, earned Bachelor of Design, Master of Architecture, and Master of Science in Real Estate Degrees from the University of Florida.

Wein estimates she has saved client companies---Forge Capital Partners in Tampa, Pinellas County Schools and The Sembler Company to name a few---more than $3 million over the past 18 months with a variety of solutions that range from construction cost control and dispute resolution to process improvement.

For more information, contact

Rachel Elias Wein, AIA, Founder / Principal, WeinPlus, 727-403-1595, http://www.weinplusassociates.com/;

Larry Vershel or Beth Payan, Larry Vershel Communications 407-644-4142, lvershelco@aol.com