Idea Harvest™

If you knew what your company knows, you'd be a lot more productive

Real stories of profit that was already sitting inside large companies, found by the people closest to the work. Every number comes from Idea Harvest™, the proprietary method Harvest Earnings has run for almost three decades. That same surfacing step is now something you can run yourself, starting with Tell Jules.

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$4.5B+

Found across almost three decades

$450M

Found at one food company

$100M

Found at one bank

Tell Jules

Use as the first step in finding what your people know

A few of the companies whose people have run an Idea Harvest™

Every figure and quote in this guide is drawn from Harvest Earnings' client record, the book Low-Hanging Fruit, and the podcast The Elephant in the Boardroom. Named results are used as the companies and executives stated them publicly.

The method behind the numbers

The people closest to the work see
the problems first. Idea Harvest™
is how it gets to the top.

Idea Harvest™ is Harvest Earnings' proprietary corporate improvement methodology, perfected over almost three decades to find and act on the problems and opportunities hiding inside large companies. The premise is simple: the people doing the work every day see where time and money leak long before leadership does, and because they live with those problems, they usually have a good idea of how to fix them.

Past a certain size, no leader can be in every site, every shift, and every conversation at once, so the problems your people already see pile up faster than they can travel up through the silos, habits, and hierarchy to reach you. Idea Harvest™ closes that gap: problems get surfaced, fixes get identified, the financial value of each one gets calculated, and a named owner carries it through.

An Idea Harvest™ takes about 100 days from the first conversation to the decision, and runs in three stages:

Stage 1 · Generate

~40 days

We talk to people across the company and surface the problems, ideas, and fixes they see.

Stage 2 · Evaluate

~40 days

We put a dollar value on each opportunity and work through the risks and trade-offs.

Stage 3 · Decide

~20 days

We approve, fund, and assign the ideas that clear the bar.

The opening conversation is the hard part. Everything in an Idea Harvest™ rests on that first stage, getting the real problems out of the people closest to the work, and for most of the method's life it took people on the ground.

A year ago the founders asked whether AI could hold that same conversation with far more people, in far less time, and make it easier to speak up honestly. That's how they built Tell Jules.

Where Tell Jules comes in

The hardest part of an Idea Harvest™
used to mean weeks on the floor.
Now it starts with a phone call.

For most of the method's life, that opening conversation was gathered by hand over about six weeks: walking floors, visiting teams, asking what got in the way of the work. Invaluable conversations, but slow, and they reached only so many people.

Tell Jules is the interviewing tool the Harvest Earnings team built to run that opening conversation inside their own Idea Harvest™ engagements, and they now offer it on its own to a much wider range of companies, reaching far more of your people in a third of the time.

How Tell Jules works

You hear from everyone

Not just the confident few who speak up in meetings. Each conversation takes about seven minutes, by phone or a link, in virtually any language, with nothing to install.

You get the real problem and the fix

Drawn out in a real conversation rather than a fixed list of questions. Jules asks follow-up questions until it understands what is happening, why it matters, and what the person would do about it.

You get a read in about ten days

Not a six-week floor-walk, because Jules runs every conversation at once instead of an interviewer working through people one by one. Problems surface while they still matter.

You get something you can move on

Short, structured reports with your people's ideas, the specific problems they see, the fix each person suggests, and the financial questions worth asking before you spend anything.

"We captured more feedback than we've ever been able to capture, and we had more solutions than issues."

Antoine Vial · CEO, Kalungi

Where an Idea Harvest™ ends, and where Tell Jules starts

A full Idea Harvest™ is the done-for-you engagement for the largest companies, and it ends with decisions already made. Tell Jules gives you a fast place to start making them yourself: the reports surface what your people see and where the opportunities are, and the call on what to chase stays yours. The stories below show what this method has uncovered, company after company. Your own company is full of the same kind of knowledge. Tell Jules is how you start bringing it to the surface.

Project Delta · H.J. Heinz

$450M

Company-wide Idea Harvest™, later replicated from the U.S. into Europe. One giant number, built from thousands of small, practical fixes Heinz's own people already knew were possible.

Large companies have detailed systems for running the business but much weaker systems for deciding which everyday problems to fix, so useful ideas sit unresolved for months. During Project Delta, employees across Heinz surfaced thousands of specific problems and fixes. About 3,000 were evaluated and taken to a clear yes or no, and the executive team worked through roughly 2,900 decisions in about ten days. Profit rose about 30%.

The story that shows why

A sauce production line kept jamming because pieces of tomato were getting stuck in the equipment. Every shutdown meant stopping production, cleaning the line, and losing capacity. The worker who ran the line every day already knew the cause, the tomato dices were too large, and his fix was straightforward: cut them smaller. But changing the recipe was not his call. R&D owned the product specifications, and Marketing was responsible for making sure consumers would still like the sauce, so the line kept jamming even though the person closest to it knew what would fix it.

The project brought the plant, R&D, and Marketing together. Marketing tested the sauce with smaller tomato pieces to make sure the change would not hurt the customer experience. It turns out consumers actually preferred the smoother sauce.

Heinz permanently switched to the smaller cut, the line stopped clogging, and the recovered capacity was worth more than $500,000 per year.

"The most important thing coming out of Delta is that we now have a process to tap into the expertise resident in this company."

Bill Johnson · CEO, H.J. Heinz

"I went from being skeptical of the approach to becoming a huge supporter."

Dave Moran · President, Consumer Business, H.J. Heinz

Project Delta at Heinz surfaced thousands of ideas. Here are two more.

Two Heinz divisions each held a piece of the same opportunity but rarely worked together. Foodservice already made popular desserts for restaurant chains under those restaurants' brands. Consumer knew how to get products onto supermarket shelves and had the retailer relationships.

A brand manager saw the connection: take a dessert customers already loved at a restaurant and sell a retail version in grocery stores. The restaurant earns licensing revenue and exposure, retailers get a recognizable brand, and Heinz builds a new line from something it already knew how to make.

Once both divisions sat together, they developed the product and brought it into retail, including Walmart. A new product line worth millions in revenue.

About 30 Heinz factories in Europe ran through separate reporting structures, so one plant had little visibility into what another produced. One factory was buying pasta shapes from an outside supplier while another Heinz factory was already making those exact shapes.

The first plant simply did not know, so Heinz paid an outside markup for something it could produce internally. A "factory-sharing day," where plants showed one another what they made, was enough to uncover the match. The markup disappeared, one of several internal-sourcing wins the day surfaced.

"Delta allowed doors to be opened, and ideas to pass through them. They made sure I shined when presenting my ideas to the executive team."

Darcie · Customer Service, H.J. Heinz

One PNC · PNC Financial

$400M

In improvement, on top of record profits the year before. PNC reached the number by getting its businesses to work together and using the knowledge already inside the company.

PNC needed to take a large amount of cost out of the business. The obvious approach, setting reduction targets from the top and telling every team to spend less, tends to cut useful work along with waste and leave customers with worse service. The people doing the work had a clearer view of what could safely go, so PNC asked them.

Employees identified unnecessary steps, duplicated work, and other costs that could disappear without hurting the customer. The bank removed $300M in expenses while increasing the number of customer-facing employees, and the effort added $100M in new revenue.

The story that shows why

PNC's procurement team was on track to save about $16M with its normal approach, negotiating contracts around the individual business units. Working that way, it could sharpen pricing without ever seeing the larger savings the people inside those businesses could point to.

PNC brought procurement and the business units into the same process so they could identify and pursue savings together. Instead of the expected $16M, procurement delivered $100M in savings. It was the first time in his career, the head of procurement said, that the function had achieved a result that large.

"Most exciting was the cultural change as employees enthusiastically showed us how much talent we had that we had not been fully using."

Jim Rohr · CEO, PNC Financial

The pattern

The same pattern shows up
company after company

Heinz and PNC were not isolated cases. Across banks, utilities, staffing firms, and manufacturers, the same thing kept happening: employees surfaced problems and opportunities leadership had not fully seen, and those ideas turned into measurable results. Here are four more, across staffing, banking, and utilities.

Manpower · Staffing

$100M

Employees across Manpower surfaced $100M in opportunities, far more than leadership expected. Part of the value was reinvested into a global rebrand, and the company used the process as a model for other major projects.

Jeff Joerres · CEO, Manpower

Webster Bank · Banking

$50M+

Teams across Webster found enough savings and improvements to control expenses while still funding new technology and growth, exceeding the $50M earnings contribution the bank had publicly committed to.

Jim Smith · CEO, Webster Bank

Energy East · Utility

6 acquisitions

Energy East used the method while bringing together six acquired companies across different jurisdictions and union environments, helping people surface the problems that needed solving as the businesses came together. "The most exhilarating effort I've been through as a CEO."

Wes Von Schack · CEO, Energy East

Mellon · Banking

$309M

At Mellon, employees surfaced $309M in improvements. Different company, different problems, same result: a nine-figure opportunity already sitting inside the organization.

Why the knowledge gets stuck

Why you don't know what
your company already knows

In most cases the useful knowledge is already somewhere inside the company. The problem is that it gets stuck before it reaches the people who could use it. Over the years we have seen that happen in three common ways: knowledge gets trapped across silos, buried inside old habits, or stuck with the person closest to the work who has no reliable way to send it upward. These are not hard rules, just the patterns we see most often. Pick one to see the stories.

One team knows what another needs, and it never travels between them.

Twenty-plus kinds of pepperoni

Each frozen-pizza recipe had been developed on its own, which left the company buying more than 20 kinds of pepperoni in small, expensive quantities. R&D, Operations, Procurement, and Marketing worked the trade-offs together and cut the list to four. Cost dropped and taste-test scores went up.

The fix that never left the plant

An engineer solved a leak on a high-speed packet machine that was costing his plant yield. Other plants ran the same machine and took the same loss, with no way to know the fix already existed. Once the plants compared notes, his fix spread. Hundreds of thousands to the bottom line.

A constraint nobody questions, because everyone assumes someone already did.

The 55% hurdle nobody could explain

Plant managers believed every investment needed a 55% return to be approved, so they stopped proposing projects. Where it came from, no one could say. It traced back to an old memo about a single plant being sold. With the real hurdle confirmed, $5M in projects came off the shelf, at about a two-year payback.

The packaging changes that looked free

Marketing changed lid colors and designs often, because from its side the changes cost almost nothing. Each one made plants retool, halt production, and scrap materials, and those costs landed in a different budget. A value-engineering step put the true cost in front of the people requesting the change. $20M saved.

The reports nobody needed

Teams produced a steady stream of recurring reports, and the managers receiving them often used a single page or number. That never traveled back to the people building them, so they kept coming. Once each report got a price tag and a review, the unused ones were cut. Hundreds of thousands in weeks.

The one who can see the fix is the furthest from the authority to make it.

A cutting problem wasting paper every day

A print shop's guillotines cut slightly off on every run, so paper kept getting wasted. The operator could see it and knew the cheap fix, cutting guides, but it was not his call. Once surfaced, the guides went on. $63,000 a year.

The "outdated" machine that still worked

A company paid an outside provider to sort mail while its own sorting machine sat unused, written off by people who did not work with it. The mail-room employee knew it still ran. Tested, confirmed, and brought back in-house. $178,000 a year.

Promo codes customers could not read

Call-center reps heard the same complaint all day. A zero read as an O, a five as an S, so customers entered the wrong promo code and gave up. Another team owned the codes. Once the reps' fix reached them, the confusing characters were swapped. Fewer orders were abandoned.

The results are real. Every one began the same way: someone close to the work knew something worth fixing, and the company found a way for it to travel. That is the surfacing step Tell Jules now runs for you.