Strategy

Every successful initiative starts with a strategic plan, based on hard-dollar returns and / or quantifiable service improvements. Our approach challenges conventional thinking, enabling identification of untapped opportunity areas for our clients. We are passionate about getting to the best answers, whether that is a re–designed network, reworked software application, a new service line, an updated data strategy, or transformation.

Service Line Offering & Go-to Market 

Taking an internal center of excellence to market? Diving into a completely new space? Leveraging existing assets & systems in a new way? New Service lines launch – for Logistics Service Providers and Shippers – is a daunting task.  The most successful launches align process, enabling system/integration, and go-to-market strategy with the specific business case for the offering.  That focus drives revenue opportunities and profitability goals that meet the expectations of shareholders, stakeholders, and service capabilities that meet new requirements for customers, vendors, and future operators. 

Organizational Change

Supply chain organizations and logistics service providers typically think of change management as a project-based activity but it’s so much more. Implementing change is a broader initiative to drive improvements across processes, technology, structure and strategy. While change impacts are typically discussed related to IT transformations, they should be considered a strategic capability and a competency of front-line hourly employees up to senior level executives. Change capabilities are built and enabled by internal dedicated resources, technologies and processes, both within human capital departments and throughout other enterprise divisions and geographies. To be clear, change capabilities are not just for the Fortune 500. Many small to medium-sized companies can build this capability, as well. Creating this capability efficiently starts with the right approach and partner to take you from current to future state, while supporting individuals, teams and your organization all along the way.

Network Design 

Determining where facilities should be located is considered one of the most strategic decisions due to the impact on cost, service, and risk in a supply chain. Optimizing product flow through existing and/or greenfield nodes considers the broadest set of variables such as local labor, real estate, inventory, service levels, risk tolerance, and transportation costs. With the variable set this broad, the analysis is performed at a higher level than the more targeted strategy project approaches described below. The goal is to align the business strategy with the modeled outcomes, but not try to be too precise

Sourcing

Sourcing can be considered a standalone project and an operating model depending on the company perspective and place in the market.   Whether your company is resource constrained, short on time, data poor, and / or lacks the tools to execute a sourcing event, it can be devastating to put off sourcing and miss a market opportunity.  Our first step is ensuring that the market opportunity exists and is significant enough to justify an event before we issue any notifications to potential service providers.  This helps maintain credibility in the market, not just for this event, but for the long-term as well. If the goal is to develop a center of excellence around sourcing and offer it to yourself or your customers, the methodology accounts for the organizational implications and adoption when building out the internal capability. 

Transportation Strategy 

Document what you do today, determining how you want to do it, and then calculate the payback. That sounds pretty simple. Unfortunately, transportation is one of the most indiscreetly managed aspects of a supply chain, even when there is a strategy in place. It’s a complex mix of modes, rotten data, confusing software markets, old-school processes, and a lot less sexy than inventory strategy or warehouse robotics. Properly defining current state, designing best-practice future state process and information flow, and evaluating total-cost-of-ownership and time-to-value, with an achievable roll-out plan and the org. implication, is our bread-and-butter.

Systems Strategy 

While pain is often identified through process observation, the root cause tends to be attributed to logical or systemic flow of data throughout the enterprise and with its trading partners.  Are we using the tools we have in an appropriate manner? Are there functional gaps creating additional manual work, or have we achieved adequate automation? Is our integration approach supporting our business requirements and growth plan?  The answer is ‘no’, and the approach moves the organization forward when typically stuck. Additionally, system landscape design supports pre/post-acquisition/divestiture activity as new entities are considered for their ability to plug in to a new technology ecosystem and to extract itself from the legacy environments.

Data Strategy

When companies experience difficulties in accessing critical business metrics it inhibits their ability to make good decisions in a timely manner.  Data strategy starts with understanding the business strategy, the decision-making frameworks, and use cases from the business team. Next, we classify, normalize, and map the attributes for master, reference, and transactional data objects with the IT subject matter experts. This step includes attributing a system of record for the various objects and defining all the consumers.  One key design component is the integration approach, driving much of the functionality to master objects, enriching and manipulating data as it transacts, and making changes to the legacy systems landscape. 

Facility Design

A Facility Design project defines the product flow requirements and models various layout options to maximize/minimize key variables like storage locations, inventory holding capacity, picks per hour, etc. The layouts can be modeled even without a specific site yet identified, which can drive the real estate search based on specific design requirements such as dock/rolled doors, racking, automation, etc. 

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