Organising for the Customer

Background

Our client is an autonomous engineering support division for an International oil company. The business supplies engineering support in the shape of strategy, design and project management to the parent (85% of T/O) and third party companies (15% of T/O). Competitive bidding had been introduced for intra-group works in order to ensure an efficient internal corporate market.

Unfortunately, the engineering business had started to loose out to third party bidders for corporate work. This was becoming an increasing trend and the management was concerned that their business may disappear unless something was done.

Consulting Assignment

The client asked us to review their business processes to see why they were loosing out on their bids.

Key Project Activities

We conducted an in depth business review including competitor review, customer survey, operational process review, executive and staff structured interviews.

As the new CEO said “we seem to have lost our focus and our customers know it..”

Having work-shopped the results of the business review with the executive team, the following were agreed:-

Strategy:
- Revised mission, vision and values to focus on the corporate customer
- Strategy and plan to support the mission
Operations:
- Process simplification to be based on customer needs (as opposed to internal legacy process/systems)
- Outsource non-core activities to save costs
Structure:
- Re-organised on a matrix basis (eliminating the legacy functional structure) with a focus on customer facing project managers and pools of expert resource
- Introduction of customer account management role
- Delayering and elimination of non-value add activities (handled via early retirement and redundancies)
- Team based management process and incentive scheme
Culture:
- Celebrating great customer service interactions & solutions

And a change programme was developed and implemented to deliver the above.

Client Benefits

The key client benefits were:

Savings achieved of 22% which were shared with group clients
Group client feedback – very positive
Group sales increased