In order for your company to realise its full potential, regular adjustments need to be made to crank up performance in a variety of areas. Our management consultants will help you to evaluate your organisation as a whole and then identify specific drivers for performance – and impediments to it, too. We will then show you where and how you can make improvements, going on to produce suitable solutions which will rapidly generate tangible results, all the while paying due attention to the importance of overriding concerns up and down the value chain: increasing turnover or profit; potentially repositioning the company; improving processes; optimising production; re-examining existing IT architecture and technology; potential savings in transportation and logistics, as well as in developing employee competences or adjusting organisational structures. 

For today’s managers, decisions on whether to up the amount of in-house production and administration (and, in many cases, needing to build up non-core competencies to do so) or to outsource (and increase dependency on external providers and suppliers) are everyday trade-offs – and genuine dilemmas. By way of example, should a carmaker which, in view of the progress of electrification, will experience an enormous surge in its demand for lithium batteries in the coming decades look to expand its competencies in procuring raw materials (including setting up a materials science department), manufacturing batteries (i.e. actually making cells), and assembling modules? Or should OEMs treat batteries as yet another commodity, leaving manufacturing to established makers and buying them in using the usual tendering mechanisms? Answering this question leads us through the full spectrum of strategic positioning, evaluating supplier landscapes, and hands-on tactical considerations. When responding to these challenges in practice, we examine the specific situation of the company, starting with its overall entrepreneurial orientation and moving through its core competencies through to a risk assessment and a detailed study of the possible economic effects. In addition, we apply our knowledge of best practice in other companies and work with the client so that, at the end of the process, a comprehensive set of recommendations can be presented to management.

Our understanding of good project governance is that it ensures that management functions are put in a position to be able to exercise their responsibilities, preventing projects from becoming trapped in between various divisions and competencies. As such, project governance constitutes a framework for measuring progress within which not only the project team itself is held accountable, but also the parts of the company who have commissioned it: these are expected to fulfil their duties in terms of sharing information and materials with the project, taking decisions where required, and offering strategic guidance. This approach to project governance posits a clear direction of travel under strong leadership, weighing up short-term and long-term goals against one another: the result is that the right decisions are made at the right time and that the project is overseen with due sensitivity vis-à-vis reporting and steering outlay. Project governance is the supreme challenge of project work – and can be supremely challenging. It requires organisations to put in place the necessary structures and anchor them deeply within the company, training staff involved in the project and applying stringent processes across the board in order to guarantee quality results. In the course of various assignments, e&Co. consultants have proven their ability to contribute to making sure complex projects deliver actual results.

Our experience shows that around 40% of outsourcing projects fall short of their goals in terms of service quality or costs savings – and even once their weak-points have been identified, outsourcing initiatives cannot be stopped overnight. Indeed, in view of contractual periods generally exceeding three years, a swift change of providers comes with considerable costs of change, which makes it all the more important to get things on the right track from the very beginning. This means sourcing strategically, rather than buying in single services on a case-by-case basis. We begin by analysing your starting position, systematically and objectively, taking an overall perspective on your sourcing orientation as it relates to the organisation as a whole and your corporate strategy. To do this, we examine the core areas: strategy and goals; organisation & structure; processes; products and services; and finance. e&Co. consultants are skilled in all areas of sourcing, from tendering and contracting through to transition management. We can also offer support in critical situations, mediating contractor-purchaser conflicts using a classic sourcing intervention approach. We call our package best-fit sourcing: it is about finding an individual, suitable, sustainable solution fitted to the needs of your company. Click here for more information.

Taking companies to new heights – with our Cloud Transformation Services.

Many companies, especially in Europe, are currently planning to migrate their infrastructure resources into innovative Cloud solutions – and there are very good reasons for so doing. The advantages of the Cloud are self-evident: highly standardised on-demand solutions which can be scaled up, at any time and at insignificant cost. Whether large corporates or family-owned champions, organisations of all shapes and sizes can use the Cloud to help them break out of problematic outsourcing contracts or to start scaling back their own expensive data centres. What is more, new, innovative business models and services of the kind needed in today’s corporate environment – but so often hampered by inflexible outsourcing arrangements or internal IT departments – can be accelerated by Cloud solutions. This kind of major change is not without a range of challenges, however, which are principally caused by the considerable alterations to internal structures, e.g. adapting traditional service management processes and organisations, modernising non-cloud-ready applications, and reviewing IT security and data protection. Our end-to-end Cloud delivery model covers all relevant and necessary aspects across the following five areas: virtual data centre layer, cloud operations, cloud governance, service management, and application cloud readiness. Click here for more information on our Cloud Transformation Service Portfolio.

We are living in the time of fastest historical change ever, and the US Military’s acronym VUCA sums up the challenges of this permanent flux perfectly: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This state of affairs has enormous consequences for how individuals and organisations navigate their way, with companies subject to the need to constantly reinvent themselves in the context of a digital world; the transformation extends to all areas of business and of life generally. Tried and tested business models now find themselves permanently under pressure and are often overtaken by new approaches. Customers have morphed into digital users – and users in turn have become the central axis around which everything else is organised. As a result, companies now have to create products and services which are of genuine use and offer real solutions to comprehensive requirements, all the while providing as much interaction and personalisation as possible. This could lead, for example, to a product-as-a-platform concept within a networked service ecosystem. To make sure to stay on the cutting edge of developments, our entrepreneurially-minded consultants develop innovative concepts and strategies which can help your organisation, your products and services, and your business models to remain competitive and relevant moving forward. And to establish a company culture in which tomorrow’s most important natural resource, the ability to innovate, is challenged and encouraged root and branch.

As architects of change, we help you to shape your organisation in such a way as it is prepared for the increasing levels of complexity in global competition. Yet although this genuinely Herculean task is one which requires the full attention of the whole management board, classic executives often fall at this step, conditioned as they are to generate consensus and avoid disruption. Yet “disruption” is just what is on the agenda, and in order to secure lasting participation in the digital economy going forward, an agile, flexible organisation with new management processes must be developed as the overall attitude to business within the company is brought up to date. Once this transformation has taken place, companies find themselves robust and structured to generate value for users rather than waste resources on internal politics. We can also offer accurate support in recruiting the right staff to drive this digital transformation, as our subsidiary skill-fisher GmbH has specialised in bringing the right companies together with hand-picked digital top talent operating at the interface between business and IT at all points of the digital value creation chain. skill-fisher is a venture which allows us to offer innovative network-as-a-service to both legacy organisations and growth-phase start-ups. While talent networks are an element of recruiting that will be of increasing importance in the future “war for talents”, many in-house HR departments remain closed to them. We are concentrating on a very specific niche within which we are continually expanding our network – and to which we can offer our clients exclusive access. 

We focus not just on deals, but on enabling real deal value, because take-overs and mergers – as well as the ensuing integration of organisations into existing structures – require the very highest standards of planning, strategy, coordination, management, and communication. Our experienced transaction experts will support you through all the phases of a tie-up, from exacting due diligence at the beginning along every step of the way through negotiations and agreements with stakeholders to contract negotiations, product portfolio and business area optimisation, and, where applicable, carve-out planning. In parallel, we take care of constant monitoring of all operative processes and consistent standardisation of business practices, ready to offer crisis management whenever required during integration. In addition, we make sure that IT systems are integrated with due strategic foresight, that staff management is put on a sustainable footing, and that the ideal depth of integration for the new company is determined early on so that the synergies envisioned can be realised to the maximum possible extent. All of our M&A activities pursue the single goal of increasing value for our clients above and beyond the growth generated by the tie-up or take-over. What is more, we see M&A processes as the ideal chance to carry out holistic optimisation of business models, performance, profitability and efficiency – i.e. to help orient the new organisation from a consolidated position of strength encompassing the best of both companies. 

“Think global, act local”: from the very beginning, e&Co. has had a strong presence in Asia, due both to long-standing client relationships in Japan and to our subsidiary in Seoul. We have continued to develop this position, and our Korean expert team has now built up a wide-ranging network across south-east Asia, composed primarily of representatives from the manufacturing industry, Chaebol conglomerates, public-policy institutions, and academia. Our Seoul office allows us to provide consultancy services to clients in the region and to function as a bridge between Europe and Asia, offering rapid yet solid access to this attractive market. Our consultancy activities focus on complex technologies and product evaluation, market entry strategies and implementation (both for Asian companies in Europe and vice-versa), scouting investment and venture capital opportunities in the start-up scene, and networking stakeholders with matching business interests. Our South Korean team works closely with the German offices, with constant exchange about our experiences, requirements, and predictions; we share analyses of upcoming trends, develop new strategies jointly, and expand our expertise on both sides of the globe.

As part of our project work, we provide you with multifaceted change experts drawn from our network of specialists and ready to work with you in a solutions-orientated way to master the central challenges facing you and your organisation. Our network includes successful company founders, experienced executives, and specialists with years of industry experience, project and change managers, and hands-on implementation experts with broad experience and a drive to get results. Use our experts to react to turbulent disrupters with the right moves, to turn your technological developments into business models as fast as they are happening, to get immediate help on reorganisation projects, to help you set up a new business unit, or to set up, take over, or sell off businesses. 

Change begins in the mind – and with the best minds. Which is why e&Co. has a diverse staff of multifaceted consulting personalities with a wide variety of backgrounds, who see their role as being bold “engineers of transformation”: thoroughbred business advisors meet physicians, mathematicians, engineers, marketing experts, finance professionals, philosophers, IT geniuses and software cracks, and even sociologists. What unites them all is their striving to think like and act as entrepreneurs. What is more, our consultants are sector-specific experts of standing who can call on an expansive network across a range of industries and deep into the start-up scene. Some of our consultants also act as mentors for leading business accelerator programs and keep up close links with selected start-up firms. These contacts allow us to act as a bridge between the fast-paced tech scene and established industrials, offering both sides advantages as our clients get direct access to the most innovative talent and their understanding of tomorrow’s trends while the start-ups benefit from our experience and passion. This combination has already proven to be decisive in several projects: in one instance, we connected an automotive group with a start-up which implemented innovative solutions for online vehicle sales; we were able to gain another young tech firm specialising in AI as a strategic partner for a big-data analytics project at an internationally-active manufacturer of commercial vehicles.

Accurate information, valid market data, and professional benchmarking are the basis for good strategic decisions; but with the sheer number of rapid developments on the market, it is becoming increasingly difficult for top management to keep this overview in all areas and distinguish the relevant facts from the buzzwordy background noise. Our consultants have their fingers on the pulse of the market – day in, day out – and can offer both an objective angle on its developments as well as a reliable feel for positive movements or dangerous shifts; they keep in regular contact with industry experts and think about how to shape the future as the context around them changes fast. Combined with our long track records of market expertise, especially in the automotive and mobility industry, our innovative foresight is what makes us the ideal partner for a range of exciting research and benchmarking projects: that’s why an Asian carmaker commissioned us to take a deep dive into the world of artificial intelligence and produce a comprehensive study of all relevant technology providers, automotive suppliers and manufacturers, and research institutions in the area with a view to pointing up potential for cooperation; the result was a strategic document which provided an extremely profound understanding of the topic and the market, leading to specific recommendations for action in research and development and in new business models. Another client asked us to produce a market study of selected initiatives undertaken by carmakers to electrify their vehicles; we also ran a research project which shed new light on the lobbying efforts of the automotive industry at European level. A South Korean government institution commissioned us to produce a survey of the international high-performance car market (supercars), and we could list several other interesting studies here, too. Why not use our excellence centre for your next ambitious research initiative? Or, if this sounds like your kind of work, why not join our successful team?

Truly excellent consultants are marked by their ability to plan for tomorrow’s world – today. And as congenital entrepreneurs, we don’t just talk about this future, but actively shape it. We support our innovative approaches and sometimes controversial ideas (because in our view, you can’t move forward without friction) with a panoply of studies, publications, opinion pieces, lectures at universities, and a series of interdisciplinary client events called “Future Talk” – that’s a title you can take at its word. We also offer thought-leadership workshops within companies, too, to help foster exchange between people inside organisations who think differently or work in different departments and, in so doing, to lay the groundwork for facing up to future challenges. Encouraging this diversity of thought leads to new solutions as different areas of organisations learn to bridge gaps between them and start working together flexibly. More than just an exercise, this approach can lead to the development of a lively, genuinely innovative company culture. At top management and board level, we also offer one-to-one executive coaching programs to enhance leadership and transformation skills, leading to an increase in value across the organisation.