We help industrial and manufacturing companies unlock profitable growth — through clear, actionable strategy and disciplined execution.

Strategy & Execution Disciplines

Business strategy is an integrated set of choices about where you choose to compete and how you will win. These decisions must take into account not only your own capabilities, but how they compare to competitors’; and they must reflect a clear understanding of the needs and capabilities of your target customers.

Strategy

Where to Compete, How to Win — and how to build Strategic Leverage

  • Mapping and segmenting markets
  • Prioritizing segments, balancing relative capabilities and segment attractiveness
  • Developing winning value propositions
  • Designing next-generation business models enabled by new technologies and capabilities
  • Competitive positioning and Go To Market
  • Growth strategies
  • Ecosystem dynamics and how to exploit them
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Manufacturing strategy

Manufacturing Strategy

What you Make (vs Buy), Where You Make it, How you Make it — and Why

Manufacturing strategy is business strategy for firms with manufacturing operations. Yet until recently, achieving the lowest landed cost has dominated manufacturing choices.

But in today's volatile environment, your production configuration must balance cost, flexibility, delivery, quality, and resilience to cost and trading shocks. Disruptions arise from wars, piracy, pandemics, exchange rate shifts, spikes in shipping costs, on-again-off-again tariffs, and more.

We help you design resilient production configurations aligned to your business strategy.

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Operating governance is the "operating system" of the organization: how business units, functions, and processes are governed

Operating Governance

How the organization makes, tracks, and enforces key decisions — especially those with strategic implications.

We build decision-making processes and mechanisms for making key choices and achieving strategic alignment across complex organizations — who decides what, and how

  • Product development portfolios
  • Joint venture governance
  • Product planning, product portfolio management
  • Resource allocation
  • Engagement models
  • Collaboration across regions & functions
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Upward view of architectural feature, illustrating organizational architecture

Organizational Architecture

The fundamental design and shape of an enterprise and its constituent units to best execute the business strategy

We design the structures — organizational configurations, roles, operating models — that deliver the capabilities required to bring the business strategy to life.

The right architecture reduces complexity, accelerates processes and accelerates transformation.

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Navigating the New Normal in Global Trade: Building Resilient Manufacturing Strategies

As trade agreements shift, tariffs fluctuate, and geopolitical tensions escalate, manufacturers need to be more strategic and adaptable than ever before. Old assumptions about cost, scale, and stability no longer hold in today’s increasingly fragmented global trade environment, and there is mounting pressure for manufacturers to rethink how and where they produce goods. However, there are...

The Limits of Supply Chain Management

A recent article (Traditional Risk Models Don't Apply During Tariff Uncertainty | IndustryWeek) usefully discussed supply chain strategies for volatile trading environments, but it didn’t address some important considerations.  The authors catalog short- and medium-term strategies for supply chain management in this much more volatile trading environment, and some of the factors to consider...

The Coming Revolution: How AI is Transforming Manufacturing

Artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionize manufacturing sooner than many industry leaders anticipate. AI isn’t coming to manufacturing. It’s already here. While buzzwords like “generative AI” grab headlines, a more consequential force is quietly taking shape on factory floors and in planning meetings: agentic AI — systems that can reason, act autonomously, and drive outcomes based on...

Escaping the “Cost of Complexity” Quagmire

When customers have many choices, companies feel the pressure to expand their product lines. Whether in capital goods or fast food, it’s tempting to add another SKU or slightly tweak a product to meet a customer’s request. This results in a broader range of offerings and increased complexity across engineering, production, sales, and fulfillment. While businesses often try to factor the cost of...

Manufacturers in Business Ecosystems: When Iron Meets Software

We've been talking about challenges for incumbent manufacturers, and suggested in our last post that for manufacturers to thrive, they need to command privileged positions in at least some of the business ecosystems in which they participate. A privileged position means: Being core to or at the center of the ecosystem; or Owning vital elements of the ecosystem (standards, technology, proprietary...

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A good strategy will struggle without appropriate governance; governance without good strategy is just ritual; and neither is effective without the right people in a suitable structure.

Strategy, Organizational Architecture and Governance need to be aligned for the organization to succeed. A good strategy that is poorly executed due to ineffective operating governance or an unsuitable organizational structure is likely to fail (or at least underperform). A reorganization that doesn’t take into account dynamic strategy is less likely to meet its objectives; and operating governance, to ensure the right people are making the right decisions, must take into account the organizational architecture and the strategy.

Any of these elements may need to change due to new competitors, changed regulations, different input costs, new technologies, or any of the other myriad ways the business environment is continuously evolving. That doesn’t mean they all must change or that they must change together — successful companies carefully evolve as the environment changes, and we can enter in any of these practice areas to begin to make improvements.   We employ distinctive techniques (such as business wargaming and organizational simulations) across all our practice areas, as well as proprietary frameworks and processes.