Organization Efficiency
Our Organization Efficiency service offering helps clients respond to competitive pressures by restructuring their organizations to achieve greater cost efficiency in their business. Our approach is grounded in the realization that clients must cut costs to grow stronger. We help our clients recognize which capabilities enable their marketplace differentiation and warrant “growing stronger” and which should be more efficiency focused. We help clients establish functional capabilities that outperform the competition by adopting a lean headquarters model, setting up and optimizing shared services, leveraging the benefits of outsourcing and offshoring models and redesigning end to end business processes. We help our clients benchmark efficiency and effectiveness of their support functions, redefine their corporate operating models, set up and optimize global shared services, design sustainable outsourcing and offshoring models and streamlined business processes.
Service Offerings
Our Organization Efficiency service offering supports clients through their improvement or transformation journey, starting with setting the agenda to helping design the new organization and processes to supporting the implementation effort. We often work with clients in four areas:
Benchmarking Overhead Functions: Booz & Company has an extensive efficiency and effectiveness benchmark database of corporate support functions. Our database includes client data from dozens of engagements around the world in the last few years. Leveraging our benchmark database and stress-tested methodology and tools, we rapidly benchmark the efficiency and the effectiveness of our client’s corporate support functions and identify improvement opportunities. Our benchmarking is always actionable, going beyond simple numerical comparisons to providing insights on the variances from the benchmarks and how the performance can be improved. We work with our clients to define a vision for the improved end-state for a single function or the entire corporate organization, develop an integrated business case for the vision, and outline a roadmap to reach the end-state.
Shared Services Strategy and Design: With our global footprint and dozens of shared services engagements, we understand the challenges of setting up and running successful captive shared services in the US, Europe, South America, and Asia Pacific. We support clients just embarking on the shared services journey as well as those looking to improve their long established shared services. We are particularly strong at developing shared services strategies, assessing the implications on the existing operating model, and planning for change management challenges. We also help our clients select their captive shared service site(s) and redesign their processes for a shared service environment. To ensure sustainability, we frequently help clients design their shared services governance processes, including setting up governance committees, developing service level agreements, and defining charge backs.
Outsourcing and Offshoring Services: Many companies are turning to outsourcing and offshoring their support services to reduce costs while improving the effectiveness of their services. We counsel our clients from defining the outsourcing and offshoring strategy to selecting the right partners to transitioning their services. In particular, we help clients develop the right strategy for them, selecting what work to offshore, which vendors to engage, and how best to design solutions that meet their needs. With our deep ITO and BPO experience, we guide vendors to provide their tailored services and best pricing that fully meet our clients’ needs. Independent of any sister outsourcing implementation services, we advise our clients candidly and completely objective, ensuring they arrive at the right solution.
Business Process Transformation: Our Business Process Transformation service helps our clients improve their processes. We apply process improvement methodologies, such as Lean and Six Sigma, and look to eliminate low value work, automate manual activities, consolidate transactional work, standardize processes around a best practice, and design “fit-for-purpose” process to balance customization and standardization. We have built significant expertise through client engagements and bring best practices for many processes, such as IT Demand Management; Budgeting, Forecasting, Reporting; Training, Recruiting, and Contract Management.
Thought Leadership
| Shared Services in Marketing Organizations: A Model for Improving Effectiveness and Efficiency | Leading companies are capturing scale from transactional activities and developing advantaged capabilibties using marketing shared services — a coordinated, consistent, and collaborative approach to their marketing service delivery model. This Perspective outlines a four-step program that companies can apply to avoid pitfalls and adopt best practices as they adopt or expand their marketing shared services model. |
| Optimizing Overhead: From Cost Center to Competitive Advantage | For both public- and private-sector organizations, in any part of the world, this reader can help change you from a reluctant manager, complying with pressure from outside, to a proactive advocate for your own best customer: Yourself. |
| Outsourcing Thought Leaders: Managing Business Without Borders |
This reader reveals that a clear view is emerging of the changes that lie ahead for the global services industry, as well as of the most effective approach for dealing with these changes. |
| The Globalization of White-Collar Work | This paper summarizes the results of a study conducted jointly with Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, which revealed that offshoring has evolved from a tactical cost-saving exercise to a strategic imperative in competing for talent. |
| CFO Thought Leaders | Few business roles have changed as dramatically during the last generation as that of the chief financial officer. The classic model — the CFO as chief accountant and technical expert focused narrowly on the firm’s financial statements and capital structure — has been passé for a decade or more. Today’s CFOs have become a vital part of the corporation’s leadership team and have assumed responsibilities of a breadth and magnitude that make the title “chief financial officer” slightly antiquated. |
| Shared Services Inc.?: From Back-Office to Profit-Maker | Companies have invested millions of dollars and accumulated years of experience in running highly efficient internal shared services operations. Now many are wondering how to unleash the next wave of value. Many believe that the next breakout strategy will take the form of an extended enterprise play, in which shared services will move beyond the walls of the corporation, either as a seller of services to external customers or as a buyer and aggregator of external services for internal clients. |
| Driving Demand Management for Internal Services | To date companies have have attacked internal service costs from the supply side. Our client experience suggests that there are benefits from managing the demand for such services. |
| Attacking Overhead Costs from Both Sides | "Business is flat. I need to cut overhead costs quickly to meet my earnings forecast. At the same time, I have to launch an even bolder round of restructuring to bring costs down 30 to 40 percent over the next three to five years. And I need to achieve these goals without undermining the core functional capabilities needed to keep my business moving and, ultimately, achieve above-market growth." Sound familiar? Seem impossible? |
| The New CFO Agenda: Global G&A Survey Insights and Implications | For most companies, significant challenges remain in improving the cost-effectiveness of their internal services. As the external environment shifts for a company's core business and the marketplace for G&A services, so too does the internal economy of the firm as BU customers demand increasingly customized services. In this charged environment, G&A practices are evolving rapidly and fundamentally. This report examines both the traditional and leading-edge approaches to G&A management and the impact on company performance. |
| Consumer products companies today face a set of challenges that are different from any they have experienced before. On one hand, market saturation, retailer consolidation, and increasingly specialized consumer preferences have slowed growth and made it more important than ever before to be first to market with customer-relevant products. On the other hand, increasing retailer power, customer price sensitivity, and mounting supply-chain complexity are exacerbating cost pressures and distracting management from its core mission. | |
| Process Ownership: The Overlooked Driver | To some extent, we are now facing "the day after" in the BPR revolution. This does not mean that we must throw out the concept in favor of a new strategic management technique. BPR remains a compelling tool for value creation, but only if we understand what has gone wrong and adapt new approaches based on these lessons learned. This study says companies must adopt new forms of process governance that are appropriate to a new process orientation. |
