Operational Consulting

What is Operations Consulting?

Operations consulting covers a breadth of services pertaining to the production, purchase, delivery and sale of goods or products. These services can cover various industries such as food & beverage industry operations, manufacturing operations, retail and ecommerce operations (including website optimization), pharmaceutical industry processes as well as service process outsourcing for sales support all across many other industries. This service provides an expertise in areas such as processing and distribution by leveraging process improvements to reduce both costs and product time to market to better meet customer needs.

What does an Operational Consultant do?

Operational Consultants work out on the frontlines, pushing the boundaries to ensure clients obtain maximum value. Duties can vary from company to company but usually include identifying and developing productivity improvements in operations and supply chain processes, implementing new strategies for competitive advantage or increases in market share.

What are sources of competitive advantage?

Market segment cost advantage is one of the key ways to create a competitive advantage. It's possible through smart marketing and planning, to find your niche within the market where you can price yourself cheaper than your competitors. Continual innovation also helps establish a competitive edge by producing new innovations. Combined with creative branding, this can help an organization maintain its competitiveness in an ever-changing marketplace. Ultimately, it's important not just to innovate, but also be able handle both internal and external competition with efficiency during times of change or disruption (i.e. inflation). In short, organizations should take care to develop a strong understanding of their customers' needs so they can identify new opportunities for improvement without compromising their position as more efficient suppliers of goods and services.

What is “operations” in supply chain management?

Supply chain operations refers to all of the company's activities from raw materials through delivery to customer. In logistics, supply chain operations include inventory control, flow of goods, customer service and coordination for shipping raw materials.

The other part of this job is planning- if a company knows how much product they'll need, when they expect their customers will want it and what their expected revenue is going to be based on the price of goods that are available at different times in different seasons or for special events then there should be less risk involved with any orders made throughout the year as well as a more efficient use of any money allocated for buyers and planners used by the company in order to purchase stock from distributors or manufacturers. This translates into higher sales.

Why is operations management important in business?

Many products and services are not self-contained: they depend on upstream processes for materials or information. Operations managers must care about visibility of inputs, outputs, how employees work together, and the client experience. They also support customer satisfaction using Six Sigma or other methods like TPS.

Essentially - operations managers ensure that the needs of diverse stakeholders (employees [also your competitors], suppliers, customers) are met in an efficient manner with as few errors as possible while balancing profit margins.

What are operational aspects of a business plan?

A business plan, or capital plan, involves an analysis of the business's management structure, revenues and expenses. It is often a document that is prepared with potentially adverse results in mind, because it includes contingencies for every possible collapse of different aspects of the project.

A thorough description about supply chains would name all vendors to be included in distribution channels; ideally it would list them by category (raw material suppliers, builders/manufacturers/assemblers of product). Operational plans detail how products or services will successfully complete their journeys from origin-point to destination-point (or "market"). Supply chain diagrams are useful for illustrating logistics operations. Business plans may include forecasts and budgets on liquidity projections and profit margins over a set period.

What does a lean operational consultant do?

Lean Operational Consultants offer expertise in continuous improvement, supply chain, and lean management to ensure a company's operations remain sustainable. A Lean Operation consultant advances the success of a business by implementing lean management techniques such as 5S and Kanban. We work in tandem with your company to grow profits, mitigate risks, improve the bottom line and implement systems that will provide for long-term growth.
We are experts at reducing operational waste through continuous improvement projects that focus on simplifying processes and reviewing past practices that have evolved over time but may not be best for the business. The end result is an efficient production process with a minimized negative impact on our environment or our natural resources.

How can business process optimization help business?

Process mapping is a technique that entails thoroughly examining and analysing an organization's workflow. This process provides valuable insights into how certain processes flow through the company. The mapping of these workflows can point to areas for improvement- there might be redundancies in the system, or it could reveal bottlenecks in communication which lead to delays or misinformation spreading.
By using specialized resources and software to automate a workflow, it allows the business more time to focus on other aspects of their enterprise, as well as meeting its targets (expanding market share, increasing productivity). Optimisation strategies are also useful where they seek to cut operational costs while improving efficiency elsewhere within an organization's network - this is especially true in supply chain management.

What is operational business intelligence?

Data analytics is the process of deriving insights, knowledge and meaning from raw data by examining its content, context and relevance.
Business intelligence analysis operates in two ways. One way it for a business analyst to sift through the company's data using search filters to find important patterns which represent an anomaly or outlying deviation from a baseline trend line representing performance against projections.
The other way for BI analysis is real time intelligence that provides insight on what's happening now. Operational BI gives insight into customer behavior, supply chain information, leads gained today versus those over desired sales period and lead score distribution across different channels of advertising are just some examples of this type of data viewing that can be done with operational BI software Microsoft Power BI.

How is operational excellence achieved?

Operational excellence is achieved by reducing costs, optimizing business processes, and improving operational efficiency so that the customer will experience improved quality.

Operational Excellence is often recognized as a company's ability to deliver successfully on all three performance categories of "Customer Experience", "Operational Efficiency" and "Business Process Effectiveness". It is about designing and executing specific activities through every process that ensures operational efficiency through flexibility and responsiveness to the customer. An organization achieves this by implementing a lean manufacturing system (see Schmidt 1997 - 2005; Kondo 2012) combined with other practices such as TPS (Toyota Production System), Six Sigma, Lean Software Development, etc.