AaronRichards is a global management consulting firm, helping our clients achieve success in highly competitive business environments

operations

As operations become increasingly globalized and supply chains grow more complex, businesses must become more cost efficient and effective at delivering what their customers need and want. Customer demand for product innovation stretches resources and challenges traditional modes of operating. Leading companies embrace collaboration, pursue integration, and enhance capabilities—ensuring success in any business climate.

Our approach is collaborative. We work closely with our clients to help transform their operations. From strategy to execution, our experts are known for reducing costs, managing complexity and risks, and improving supply chain performance. We are your quintessential partners in building competitive advantage.
 
Our operations consulting expertise includes:

  • Benchmarking & Best Practices: We assess a client's performance against global best practices, providing much-needed insights and tools that can drive project excellence. Our expertise includes benchmarking processes across industries and geographies, evaluating performance from both a technical and transformational perspective. By bringing our benchmarking expertise across our client’s organizational spectrum, our clients not only meet their immediate goals but also transform their organizations in preparation for all future endeavors. Research reveals a strong correlation between consistent use of business best practices and the ability to operate at lower cost and deliver greater value.

  • Complexity Management: Not all complexity is bad. There's a crucial difference between value-creating complexity, which should be actively and efficiently controlled, and value-destroying complexity, which should be reduced to a bare minimum. Our approach is to address both those areas that are visible to the company's customers (packaging and product variants, for example) and those that are not, such as manufacturing processes, supply chain configuration, or organizational structure. We do this by reallocating costs at activity level to calculate real profitability levels ("pocket margin"), carefully assessing complexity's strategic value in both quantitative and qualitative terms, and building a "multi-cube" data model to simulate and actively manage tradeoffs across the value chain.

  • Service Design & Operations: We help define the target customer experience, translate it into operational requirements, and ensure consistent service delivery across channels in the most cost effective way. Our work helps companies’ jumpstart a cycle of increased employee satisfaction, improved service quality and improved customer loyalty that impacts both the top and bottom line.

  • Business Process Redesign: AaronRichards works with each client to prioritize key processes based on the value at stake. For each priority process we develop a view of the current state based on operational data, using detailed process maps and analysis to help identify major gaps. We then work together with a cross-functional client team to define a series of principles that will guide the solution generation phase, and create a vision of the future state of each process from the ground up, along with the roadmap to achieve the near and long term results.

  • G&A Optimization: Top-performing companies have top-performing General and Administrative (G&A) functions that help enable their broader business strategy and objectives. In ouur experience, optimizing within each G&A function creates improvement but is rarely enough to reach full potential. The biggest gains come from looking within and across G&A functions and fundamentally changing the way people work together to deliver the highest-value G&A support.

  • Capability Sourcing: We help companies achieve sourcing excellence through a range of services including blueprint/design, outsourcing partner selection and transition, strategic offshoring implementation and support, and value delivery. Outsourcing and offshoring have evolved into much broader opportunities to drive transformational change.

  • Research & Development Optimization: We help companies, across a range of industries, maximize their returns on R&D investments. But delivering superior returns often requires transformational change: treating R&D as an integrated innovation system rather than as a functional silo.

  • Cash & Capital Management: AaronRichards helps clients around the globe in liberating cash, increasing the velocity of capital through the system, improving ROIC and instilling a disciplined approach to driving cultural change. In most cases, the effort is self-funded with very short payback periods.