Operational Consulting: Operational Excellence

At a glance

• Agility – creating a modern and adaptable framework
• Efficiency – driving down costs through operational agility
• Profitability – Removing silos to enhance revenue
• Capability – Ensuring skills and knowledge for a digital future
• Growth – Innovating for success

Digital disruption, evolving consumer demands, regulatory and legal changes as well as a new economic revolution are just some of the forces driving the urgency to modernise business operations. Change, of course, is nothing new in business. But the pace of transformation and the need to adapt has accelerated. The Fourth Industrial revolution requires a renewed focus on operations as critical components of business growth.

For example, technological advances are affecting business operations by radically changing the ways in which products are manufactured, delivered and marketed.

Political upheaval around the globe has brought into sharp relief the interconnectedness of today’s world and business operations. It illustrates how when one part fails, it can trigger an immediate and sudden impact on the rest of the interwoven chain.

Inactivity is not an option for business operations. They must continually and continuously evolve and adapt. Internal and external challenges are a constant, therefore management must be ready to modernise and reimagine operational structures in today’s world.

Akash Patel, management consultant, Mazars, says: Every business faces some sort of operational challenge to varying degrees over its lifetime. It's never a static issue. When we look at the different external factors such as COVID, the Ukraine war, and the impact on supply chain management you can see how organisations have had to rethink their supply chains retrospectively.

Our past successes working with organisations of all sizes proves that operational performance improvement isn’t about large teams, but rather effective application of the best systems and/or efficient processes. We understand desires and realities don’t always perfectly match and we know that organisations are constrained, especially in the current economic landscape. Our expertise and technical know-how mean we work effectively within those paradigms to achieve the best outcomes for our clients.

Innovative thinking

The age of transformation demands more than just quicker ways of doing the same old things. The complexity of data innovation, machine learning and universal connectivity that is reshaping our world requires us to reimagine and transform operations.

At Mazars, we work hand-in-hand with clients to proactively put in place measures for continual operational improvement. This approach helps clients avoid firefighting and ensures that organisations can function as business as usual without a punitive hit to profitability.

Patel says: We work alongside our business and operations leaders to understand what their long-term ambitions are, taking a truly holistic view of a client’s situation and quickly bringing together the best team to work with the client to achieve their objectives, and proactively look at both the top line growth as well as bottom line improvement. That way, we focus on becoming more proactive rather than reactive.

End-to-end vision

Our expertise lies in considering the whole value chain because of its interconnectedness. Operational improvement can be carried out within one function, but an overview of the entire business is likely to afford greater advantages in terms of cost savings and improved profitability.

The real enablers of operational improvement consider culture, management and leadership across all business functions. Our strength lies in the ability to tap into our networks of industry experts who know how businesses operate from the boardroom to the factory.

Patel says: Operational transformation is always driven by culture, leadership and performance metrics. An end-to-end vision is crucial for operational transformation as it provides a holistic understanding of the entire organisation and how its different components work together. Using lean six sigma techniques, our team assesses your entire value chain for operational inefficiencies, identifies root causes of these inefficiencies and develops effective strategies to resolve these. More importantly we link the impact of these to your financial statements.

The goal of growth

The ultimate aim of any operational review is not just to secure savings and boost efficiency but also to provide a clear pathway for future revenue growth. To do this, at Mazars, we benchmark an organisation with an array of similar sized businesses across sectors.

In that way, we review end-to-end processes to assess working practices, skills as well as considering collaboration within the business to establish where we can make improvements and where the opportunities for growth lie.

Akash says: The beauty of Operational Consulting at Mazars is that our projects are driven by Return On Investments for the client. We have a team who have seen the challenges first hand in industry. They have a deep understanding of the operational and commercial requirements in the manufacturing sector and a highly tuned sense of where market opportunities lie. Our Team have uncovered and resolved operational issues in various sectors, uncovering growth in smaller enterprises as well as large corporates.

Armed with our deep-dive insights, management can then consider what aspects they want to prioritise based on their current strategy. Ensuring close collaboration, we work together from strategy to execution and completion, employing tools that drive margin and revenue growth, and provide clients with a transformation they can own.

In a world of increasing complexity, where organisations face multiple economic headwinds, cash flow is one of the biggest challenges for most businesses. The benefit of operational transformation allows businesses to release cash for investment and to achieve that in a structured and efficient way.

Anticipating change

With consumer behaviours and business demands rapidly changing, an organisation’s service delivery must adapt in its competitor space to go beyond those expectations. Leveraging an agile implementation approach to Lean, Six Sigma and other industry tools, we provide clients with the insights to tackle problem areas and develop solutions with users at the core of operations.

Through our propositions on operational performance improvement we take clients on a journey fuelled by critical insights, using leading technology to enhance these. We provide a step-by-step approach to selecting the right kind of transformation so our clients can own their operational transformation and embed it throughout the business to ensure sustainability into the future.

Whatever the drivers are for change in your business Mazars will unlock resilience and set your company on the right path for growth.