Specialty Brand Company

For over 40 years this brand company has been operating production and multi channel retail operations in North America while also successfully distributing their industry best in class products around the globe.

Their current operating conventions were consuming excessive working capital, operating costs were rising and some early indications suggested a loss of customer engagement. New entrants, competitor resets and solution substitutions had started to shape new customer value expectations. This industry leader recognized that they had failed to effectively evolve within their market and had become overly reliant on short interval, stop gap measures and “home run” new product launches.

The leadership team suspected that it was time to transition from a product centred, multi-channel operator to a fully customer centred, omni-channel operating model. A model which relied less on past experiences and tacit knowledge and instead learned how to utilize internal and externally accessible data sources to better understand their environment and to utilize intelligent technologies to operate in a more agile manner. Their executive team recognized such a transition in operating conventions would be challenging and were concerned that they might damage their brand reputation in the process. In other words ‘don’t destroy what makes us great in the process of making us better.’

Objective Business Review

Recognizing that some functions within the organization were already consistent with leading or ‘close enough’ practices, our team executed a rapid Objective Business Review in order to identity where key operating conventions would benefit from a shift towards a customer centred approach. Our assessment focused on how customer value is delivered today, where are the opportunities to create new customer value and how the operating model must evolve to capture and execute these opportunities. We assessed operating capabilities within each of the primary business function including Marketing, Product Development, Category Management, Supply Chain, Retail and Production Operations. The business benefits associated to these identified initiatives focused on specific planning and execution opportunities within each of these business functions as well as the considerable benefits of a customer centred, integrated approach across these business functions.

Outcomes Achieved

Fourteen improvement initiatives relating to four primary groupings around customer engagement, operational integrated planning and execution, working capital reduction and the development of a performance based culture required to facilitate necessary behavioural changes in order to execute and sustain the value building initiatives.  These initiatives included new product development, digital marketing , category management and channel execution. Benefits included a recurring 9 % targeted increase in sales, 3 fold increase in operating income and one time working capital savings equivalent to 12 % of sales.

What’s Next

It has been our experience that often the greatest challenges is not whether the operating model design changes have been tuned to their fullest potential, but instead actually achieving the desired behavioural changes need to effectively execute. The development and deployment of a Performance Based Culture framework which placed and emphasis on capturing and measuring behaviours will be developed and rolled out to the senior executive team. The Holborn team will continue to support each of the senior executives on an intermittent basis over the next several months to ensure their transformation process is successfully integrated into their regular operations.