Posted on Tue, Jan 26, 2010 @ 01:25 PM
Industry: Agriculture - Dairy Equipment
Function: Finance, IT, Business Development
Location: Global
Our client (a $1.5 billion portfolio company owned by a European PE firm) designed, sold, and installed sophisticated, customized agricultural systems globally. The process of design selection, delivery, onsite installation, and startup would often be the first experience a customer would have with the company. A positive experience would lead to higher wallet share capture with increasing margins in the aftermarket sale of parts, service and consumables. Conversely a negative experience would often lead to only minimal purchases (i.e. sole sourced items) and alternate vendor selections for service and material for the installation lifecycle that averaged upwards of ten years. The primary metric was the On-Time, In-Full Delivery (OTIF) of capital sales for projects. Our client was experiencing an unprecedented level of backlog and missed deliveries due to both internal and external factors primarily:
- The implementation of a new ERP system,
- A new organizational design splitting the order fulfillment process into two different legal entities,
- A new management team at a key supplier, and
- Record capital sales in 2008 as a result of high milk prices.
These factors created a degradation of capital order delivery to an estimated OTIF rate of less than 20% for the first nine months of 2008.
An MMG associate joined in the last quarter of 2008 through the end of 2009 to lead the day-to-day capital goods order management and delivery process--and to improve delivery performance and operational effectiveness, reduce inventory levels, and improve customer service. Our guy led a cross functional Project Sales team to establish processes, roles and responsibilities, documentation, and metrics for managing project orders. In addition, the team sought to improve communications between the supply chain, the sales team and independent distributors, and key suppliers. Finally, significant coordination and management was required to ensure that consistency and commonality was achieved in the North America and the European designs.
As a result, the OTIF percentage on a monthly basis improved to over 90% on a consistent basis by the beginning of 2010.
As part of the project, we also designed and led a ‘voice of the customer' survey creating a discussion and scoring template, conducting customer/ distributor interviews, analyzing data, and reporting results and actionable recommendations to the senior management committee. This allowed the MMG team to identify and address the systemic root causes of the On Time, In Full delivery failures.
Finally, the effort also included the re-implementation of the risk management system for capital good sales (suspended during the ERP installation). We introduced a customer sign-off process that validated the training, documentation delivery, and system performance--creating a written record to reference against potential, future claims, and providing critical "post-sales" expectation-setting and support.
Posted on Sat, Mar 14, 2009 @ 07:29 PM
Industry: European Luxuary Automotive Sales/ Distribution
Function: Sales
Location: Domestic US
Our client had an aggressive three-year goal:
increase sales in a franchise distribution channel by 40% without
adding dealers or hiring more sales people. Only one approach could
achieve that outcome: make the existing sales force more effective and
productive.
In this case, “more productive” means taking a
group of already-high achievers at the retail outlet and individual
level, and making them better.
We have helped our client to profile, replicate
and recruit the objective metrics among retail locations, and the
elusive professional and personal traits among individual sales
performers, that define "Top 10%" - and help our client to develop the
people, processes, tools and support, and working environments that
help them to thrive at these dramatically higher levels of performance.
The goal was ambitious - to infuse “top
performer” attributes throughout the retail channel, creating a culture
populated by top-performing stores and people. Early-stage results for
this program and related initiatives showed an effective double-digit
productivity increase in sales.
Posted on Sat, Mar 14, 2009 @ 07:26 PM
Industry: Medical Devices
Function: Marketing & Sales
Location: Domestic
A
$100MM business unit of a global medical device/ pharmaceutical giant
was a newcomer to a market segment dominated by entrenched,
deep-pocketed global competitors such as Johnson & Johnson and
Bayer.
Working with our client’s marketing department and
marketing/technology services providers, we designed, implemented and
managed integrated marketing programs, a CRM system and a series of
targeted marketing projects. To make these programs successful, we
worked with our client to:
- Identify priority marketing objectives, and key customer needs, in their “complex sale” retail environment;
- Aggressively develop new product and services offerings, designed
to deliver information, influence, and leverage for our clients sales
force with regard to their target customers;
- Design structured processes to collect more market intelligence,
convert this market intelligence into meaningful management
information, and use it to develop subsequent programs; and
- Managed the cross-organizational business team, covering sales and
marketing, IT, finance, vendor-partners, and IT/ systems development.
The goal was daunting—carve market share directly from the segment
leaders in a flat market—and our client realized steep gains by taking
share from market leaders over a three-year period, using the key
programs we worked with them to design and implement.
Posted on Sat, Mar 14, 2009 @ 07:24 PM
Industry: Specialty Chemicals
Function: Executive Management, Commercial Operations
Location: Global
A
$2.5B global chemical company was formed by spin-off/ sale from GE to
private equity in 2006 – selling three "pieces" of GE's Advanced
Materials business. The PE firm "bought out" the existing joint venture
partners, combined them with the wholly owned subsidiary, and sought to
create "one" global company - with one rationalized supply chain, a
strategy for marketing and customer engagement, and an integrated set
of global corporate functions.
We worked with the CEO. exec team and other "insiders" to put in place a global management structure for
this firm--its first--and to manage the project plan to achieve key
results:
- Deliver the short-term productivity improvements (about $10MM) from functional, geographical, and resource consolidation,
- Design and implement a new business-planning and follow-up performance-management approach for business leaders;
- Spec new roles, and organize existing talent to locate the right talent in key positions,
- Build a strong global marketing function (for the first time) and
- Communicate the process, plan and outcomes to the company.
After delivering the productivity improvements, the team has followed up to help the newly formed marketing groups outline their
plan for growth, and get started on effective execution to achieve
needed growth outcomes. In addition, the business will be focusing on the
processes and “new behaviors” to drive successful profitable growth, at
the global “corporate-optimal” level.