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 Thu, May 14, 2009 @ 07:22 PM
Industry: Global Industrial Equipment Manufacturer
Function: Finance
Location: Global
A
$4.5B multinational industrial automation company had grown organically
over many years, leading to widely decentralized functions, a heavy
overhead burden and slow execution performance. The firm had sold off
pieces of its business portfolio, but had not reduced staff functions
and corporate overhead commensurately.
We joined an effort in
progress to remake the Finance organization, to create a single global
function—and to help reshape the other corporate functions (HR,
Marketing, Quality, MIS, Logistics, etc.) in a similar manner.
Working
with the internal senior executive sponsor, we developed and introduced
a range of tools and approaches to help cross-functional and
cross-business stakeholders develop and decide on how to achieve
effective functional governance and “execution”—in ways that worked to
meet performance demands, and fit with company culture. We supported
selected functions outside of Finance and geographic regions outside of
North America to achieve improved productivity and business growth.
Finally, we facilitated senior Finance management strategy development,
coordinated “calls to action”, and helped manage overall program and
communications.
Net project results - Year 1: $20MM bottom line
improvement in Europe, $100MM opportunity identified overall. Financial
monthly reporting cycle time performance improved by 35-50%. Overall
process headcount declined 25%.
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.