Tag: Proven Results

Plaintiffs’ Law Firm Accelerates Its Performance for the Next Generation of Client Advocacy

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Plaintiffs’ Law Firm
Accelerates Its Performance
For the Next Generation of Client Advocacy

Opaque, antiquated business processes combined with legacy technology and significant investments in under-performing practices were causing financial results to stagnate at this leading plaintiffs’ bar law firm.

P&C helped develop and implement an aggressive transformation program to increase revenues, reduce costs, manage risks, and ensure sustainable growth.




A Strong Reputation Is Not Enough When Performance Lags

Our client had a strong reputation for legal excellence and zealous representation of their clients in pursuit of equitable outcomes. Despite professional success, the firm lacked visibility into which business segments created value and was hampered by outdated processes and systems that eroded revenue, increased cost, elevated risk, and distracted attorneys from client service.

At the recommendation of their bankers, they turned to P&C to help pivot the firm, accelerate its performance, and thereby ensure its legacy of outstanding legal advocacy.


P&C Calls for a Rigorous Transformation Program to Address Multiple Issues

P&C designed and implemented a comprehensive transformation program with these goals in mind:

  • Optimize Business Mix: Shifting resources to the most profitable and highest future growth segments of the firm
  • Increase Revenues: Growing both legal fees and effective, appropriate expense recovery
  • Reduce Costs: Optimizing outlays related to technology, procured goods and services, and effective tax planning
  • Manage Risk: Revamping the insurance portfolio including professional liability, property and casualty, employee health and wellness, addressing cybersecurity, and responding to pandemic impacts
  • Build Capabilities: Developing processes, systems, and human capital

P&C Recommends and Implements Key Programs for Each Improvement Lever

P&C drove each of these workstreams on an agile basis, using mechanisms such as daily stand-up calls and remote collaboration tools to coordinate work and ensure progress across multiple organizations and functions. To ensure sustainable impact and continuous improvement, we upgraded the capabilities of the client’s leadership team by developing the skills non-attorneys who had potential but lacked requisite training, and identifying and replacing other staff members where required.

  • Optimize Business Mix

    • Increase the ratio of junior to senior attorneys given their higher margins
    • Shift legal staff towards practices with consistent track records and outlook for profitability

  • Grow Revenues

    • Drive growth in focus practices through targeted marketing, business development, and potential openings in new strategic markets
    • Use proven, effective technologies to streamline and maximize the recovery of client-related expenses including legal research, eDiscovery, and printing

  • Reduce Costs

    • Consolidate and streamline eDiscovery solutions and processes to reduce hosting expenses while improving the effectiveness of case teams
    • Redesign employee benefits plan and negotiate with carriers based on analysis of multi-year health claims and other actuarial data to develop a better plan at significantly less cost
    • Reduce technology and other procurement spend categories by focusing on the total cost of ownership across the lifespan of agreements, identify and retire costly legacy systems, and consolidate spend across vendors to obtain better services at less cost
    • Identify retroactive tax credits missed by legacy accountants and work with them to file amended tax returns to claim retroactive tax credits rightfully due to the client
    • Streamline travel and expense management through a new integrated system including a new corporate credit card and IT solution to enable straight-through transaction processing to their financial system

  • Manage Risk

    • Perform comprehensive review of the insurance portfolio including Professional Liability, Property & Casualty, and Cyber Security policies, consolidating and replacing brokers and carriers as necessary to address coverage gaps while simultaneously reducing costs
    • Harden IT infrastructure to mitigate the threat of network intrusion and data breach by locking down devices, replacing firewalls, cleansing account access permissions, updating password protocols, implementing multi-factor authentication, developing mobile device policies, purging obsolete data, and responding to incidents
    • Develop and deploy standard compliance policies and procedures including Grants of Authority, Procurement, and Conflict Check workflows to reduce waste, duplicative spend, and missed expense recovery opportunities
    • Respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by deploying a comprehensive suite of technologies to modernize document management and workforce collaboration systems while funding the program via available pandemic-related grants

  • Build Capabilities

    • Develop a bespoke business analytics solution to enable equity partners to gain real time visibility into firm performance, as well as drill down into specific practices, cases, and timekeepers
    • Implement modern Document Management System (DMS) to consolidate firm information onto a single, secure, accessible platform
    • Create and deploy a revenue forecasting process to provide a systematic view of expected cash inflows by practice and case
    • Restructure General Ledger and recompile historical results to provide a clear view of financial performance and trends by segment
    • Deploy IT helpdesk case management system to maximize responsiveness and improve support to legal teams and staff
    • Develop human capital by recruiting for critical staff positions and establishing customized learning and development agendas for select current employees

Transformation Program Results in $25M Annual Profit Increase

Taken together, these programs yielded an enormous benefit to the firm, generating $25 million in annual profitability improvements. The impacts were balanced, with roughly three-quarters stemming from revenue increases and the remainder from cost savings.

The improvements ensured that the transformation remained cash flow positive across our entire 18-month engagement. From the standpoint of our client’s leadership team, these benefits represent a near doubling of typical annual profits per equity partner.

Beyond these tangible impacts, the firm is now positioned for strong growth with a focused strategy, solid infrastructure of business processes and systems, optimized risk profile, and robust pool of talent. Their legacy of client service can continue to flourish.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

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Turning Losses Into Profits for a Global Apparel Retailer

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Global Apparel Retailer
Turns Losses into Profits
By Updating Branding & Merchandising Strategies

Plummeting profits jeopardized a high-end apparel retailer’s ambitious growth strategy. P&C helped its client develop an aggressive turnaround plan that aligned branding and merchandising strategies across its retail channels, streamlined and improved inventory management and ensured that it designed and stocked popular products with high margins.


P&C Helps This Retailer Accelerate Growth by Focusing on High Profitability Products & Upgrading Its Fast Fashion Brand Image

The new leaders of this multi-brand clothing and accessory retailer, known for its legendary brands and global footprint, hoped to accelerate growth by expanding into adjacent areas and extending its retail network. But with profits plummeting by 90 percent, they recognized the need to strengthen branding and inventory management while reducing costs to achieve its ambitious growth strategy.

Working with the firm’s CEO, P&C developed a comprehensive turnaround plan that included short-term profit gains and long-term initiatives for sustained growth. We aligned branding and merchandising strategies, focused product development on items with high profitability for both its retail and catalog outlets and ensured organizational support. We also redesigned their inventory forecasting models, supply chain, and inventory management systems to improve efficiency and better meet customer demand.

To achieve over $400 million in annual profit improvements, P&C helped this company launch initiatives to increase overhead savings, boost its brand image, eliminate less profitable brands and products, and introduce a new “look” for its highest margin, fast fashion brand.


With improved inventory controls and product development, this retailer can stay ahead of trends, fueling faster growth. Our turnaround plan successfully reversed return on equity from a loss to a 6X increase.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

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Outsourcing Focuses Tech Company on Its Core

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Tech Company
Achieves Significant Cost Savings
By Adopting a Stringent Outsourcing Strategy

A technology company that had experienced massive revenue and share loss in the previous 3 years sought P&C’s help implementing a transformation program with a stringent sourcing strategy. P&C evaluated outsourcing options for business processes and IT and made recommendations that achieved $85 million in annual cost savings for the company.




P&C Helps This Client Focus on Core Competencies & Determine Outsourcing Opportunities

Our Tech Company client had experienced massive revenue and share loss during the previous three years, though the company had conserved cash through significant cost reductions. Management developed an ambitious strategy to transform the company by refocusing the organization on core competencies.

The P&C team provided solutions to the following questions:

  • What should be considered for outsourcing?
  • What’s the best end-game option (best-in-breed vs. one-stop)?
  • How do we rush through Request-for-Proposal (RFP) and negotiations without leaving money on the table?

The sense of urgency was high because our client needed to sign a contract in less than 9 months; however, there were a number of complications:

  • The company was completely vertically integrated for core products
  • An “I don’t trust foreigners” mentality prevailed
  • 75% of the executive team were new to the job
  • Many in the company were skeptical of outsourcing due to past failures
  • The client was in the midst of a transformation of its business model


P&C Considered the Outsourcing Potential Along Its Client’s Value Chain & Used a Systematic Approach to Evaluate the Sourcing Potential for Each Division

  • Operations (engineering, procurement, manufacturing)
  • Customer service and support (CS&S)
  • Warranty and repair
  • Support functions such as Finance and Accounting (F&A), HR and IT

  • Set Strategy & Key Success Factors

    • Understand client strategy and resulting market positioning
    • Determine factors key to successfully implementing strategy
    • Understand management’s goals on the company’s future

  • Diagnose Internal Activities

    • Create detailed process maps of activities under consideration
    • Proceed along the company’s value chain, division by division
    • Evaluate each activity against industry benchmarks

  • Map Activity Strength & Strategy

    • Evaluate importance of achieving key success factors
    • Map against performance against industry competitors

  • Filter Against External Market

    • Determine if external market exists
    • Define set of potential sourcing partners
    • Assess risk of utilizing external market
    • Evaluate in-house solution, based on management-initiated turnaround strategy

  • Develop Sourcing End State

    • Develop action plan by and across activities
    • Assess high level organization impact
    • Objectively compare in-house vs. outsourced solutions with respect to risk/reward

Our Recommendations

Vendor Identification & Selection

  • Launch request for information (RFI) and thorough RFP process
  • Select potential suppliers based on agreed-to criteria developed with the client’s key stakeholders

Deal & Contract Negotiation

  • Execute thorough due diligence
  • Build base case model, normalize bids, and ensure price flexibility
  • Develop and negotiate service level objectives and service level commitments
  • Start deal promptly to stay within requested nine-month timeframe

Transition and Migration

  • Maintain focus on day-to-day responsibilities
  • Align organization with outsourcing effort

A Few Basic Takeaways Proved to be Essential:

  • Ground sourcing in company strategy
  • Determining relative performance
  • Assessing external market opportunities
  • Investing in a robust, multi-sourced RFP process
  • Addressing implementation issues early

Within 9-Months, P&C Created Significant Value For Its Tech Client, Totaling ↑75X P&C’s Fees

  • $8M in cost savings from IT outsourcing (ITO)
  • $25M in a one-time asset impairment write-off
  • $23M in cost savings from Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), including outsourcing 50% of Finance operations and 85% of Human Resources operations
  • Service levels at or better than current levels, including continuous improvement efforts

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

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A Fortune Global 500 Refines Strategy to Unleash Growth

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Diversified Fortune 500
Unleashes Growth
With Tailored Strategies for Cash Cows, Tigers, and the Middle

We helped our diversified conglomerate client find new business opportunities, define strategies for the holding company’s smaller businesses, and clarify the strategic and operational role of the center.


P&C Helps This Fortune 500 Conglomerate Evaluate Its Portfolio of Companies to Align with Its Profitability Targets

Our client owned many businesses in sectors that included industrial equipment, automotive components, major domestic appliances, commercial financial services, energy, and real estate development, among others. The company had diversified into several non-related businesses but had failed to achieve its profitability targets.

Its board of directors set a minimum return for all the companies in the portfolio, but many of them fell below their goals. P&C was brought in to help:

  • Find a new business opportunity that could eventually replace the reliable cash generator (cash cows)
  • Define strategies for the smaller businesses (tigers) so that they would either achieve their value creation objectives or be divested
  • Clarify the strategic and operational role of the center to achieve overall growth

P&C Created a Framework for Each of 4 Challenges

Challenge I

Growth in New Businesses

Identify 2-4 profitable business opportunities similar in size to current cash cows

Challenge II

Sustainability of “Cash Cows”

Define strategies to continue milking businesses through turmoil and changes in industry

Challenge III

Strategy for “Tiger Businesses”

Programs to find strategic/operational improvements or divest money-losing businesses

Challenge IV

Improve Role of Center

Articulation of new strategy and corporate role

P&C Focused on Product Line Profitability to Determine Divestiture Targets

P&C’s first priority was to redesign the money-losing businesses, or tigers. Rather than divesting whole companies, we recommended that our client divest product lines. We also delivered detailed business plans for three new endeavors and a new corporate role.

P&C’s program resulted in a dramatic increase in ROIC—from 13% to 25% over two years. Our client is now working with us on adjacent business opportunities that we identified.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

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Appliance Retailer’s Performance Improvement Boosts Shareholder Value

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Appliance Retailer
Boosts Shareholder Value
By Focusing on Execution, Simplification, and Strategy

Our high growth retail client experienced a significant share price decline after missing earnings expectations. We identified the company’s core strengths and performance improvement options. The resulting broad-based performance improvement program created $2.5 billion in shareholder value.



P&C Helps Its Client Take a Step Back to Realign Product & Pricing With Customer Strategy

Our retail client had enjoyed high growth and was planning to double its store count within 2-3 years, as well as increase diversification into new channels, products, and geographies. Unfortunately, they had failed to meet earnings expectations for the first time, causing a significant share price decline. Investors blamed a variety of factors including concept saturation and over-diversification.

P&C Worked With the Client to Address the Following Questions

  • How do we identify, prioritize, and resolve execution limitations that are blocking our ability to rapidly grow?
  • How can complexity be reduced to lower costs and grow the top line?
  • What changes should we make to our product and pricing strategies to align with our customer strategy?


P&C Identified the Client’s Core Strengths Before Articulating Its Performance Improvement Options

P&C Launched a Broad Performance Improvement Program for this Retail Client

  • Revenue

    Marketing/Product Development
    • Consolidated and refocused marketing spend
    • Targeted programs by segment to grow share of wallet and number of customers
    • Reprioritized R&D pipeline
    Organization and Staffing
    • Restructured field front line management
    • Created performance management and incentive system
    • Optimized store level staffing by store type

    Key driver of company store sales out-performance (~10% higher than retail industry average over multi-year horizon)

  • Product Costs

    Sourcing
    • Centralized procurement function
    • Consolidated vendors
    • Re-negotiated contracts
    • Developed strategic supplier relationships

    Drove $30M+ of annual savings after year one

    Product Line Profitability
    • Assessed true profitability of all store level SKUs
    • Eliminated or re-priced 1000+ problem SKUs
    • Rationalized R&D Spending

    Drove $11M of annual savings

  • Store Operations

    Labor
    • Implemented store best practices
    • Enhanced store labor productivity by eliminating admin work
    • Increased store level automation

    Saved $40M in annual labor staffing costs

    Real Estate
    • Redefined store “full potential”
    • Assessed store portfolio and optimal real estate economics
    • Improved efficiency in leasing, construction and repair and maintenance

    20% annual R&M savings and a 5% increase in new store ROI

P&C’s performance improvement initiatives created $2.5 billion in shareholder value since the beginning of the relationship.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

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Plaintiffs’ Class Action Law Firm Optimized Profitability Via Comprehensive Transformation

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

Preeminent LLP*, a leading U.S. class action law firm ranking nationally, in nine practice areas, sought P&C’s guidance to streamline their operations and prepare for the next phase of expansion. Building upon decades of landmark legal victories and unrelenting advocacy for their clients, they asked P&C to refine their practice mix, improve the usefulness and clarity of financial reporting, and assess key leaders of core business functions across the Firm.

At a Glance


The Situation

The Firm’s Executive Committee sought P&C’s insights and recommendations on the following topics:

  • Is the Firm optimally allocating resources across its current practices and offices?
  • Could the Firm optimize its costs to become more profitable?
  • Are there attractive opportunities in new practice areas yet untapped by the Firm?
  • Is the Firm consistently and effectively projecting its brand image to key target audiences?
  • How can we improve current financial processes to streamline effort, reduce manual labor, and provide timely and transparent visibility and controls across both revenues and expenses?
  • How do our compensation and benefit programs compare to local and national peer groups; specifically, are our compensation and benefit programs competitive to attract and retain the best talent in the nation?
  • What tangible near-term opportunities are available to reduce costs and maximize revenues?

Our Approach

P&C proposed an integrated approach to address the Firm’s questions and goals:

Our Recommendations

Responding to Preeminent LLP’s ambition to rapidly transform their business and prepare for the next phase of growth, P&C designed and executed a series of three initiatives spanning the full spectrum from strategy through implementation:

  • Strategic repositioning. Assessed each practice and office based upon their historical financial performance and strategic fit – in terms of reinforcing or conflicting brand perceptions and relationships with key decision-makers – developed corresponding staffing plans to grow or triage the practice, launched new offices, and prepared for future mergers and acquisitions.
  • Capability development. Dramatically strengthened core functions, establishing the infrastructure to drive and support subsequent expansion:
    • Marketing and Public Relations: articulated the organization’s brand, refined key target business development and other stakeholder audiences, selected a best-in-class public relations firm, and developed critical platforms to generate prospects and to develop successful, enduring client relationships.
    • Finance: streamlined the incumbent accounting system to inform key decisions by transforming the general ledger structure, implemented revenue and expense forecasting processes and controls, automated low-value transaction processing by digitally transforming the accounts payable processes, and implemented an aggressive procurement program to optimize non-labor expenses.
    • Technology: overhauled the practice and financial management systems, implemented an enterprise document management solution – shifting from a legacy platform to an industry leading enterprise software platform – and implementing a best-in-class digital workflow which integrated firm-wide business processes to eliminate duplicative, manual work. Integrated all enterprise systems together for seamless straight-through transaction processing and reporting. Identified and addressed an array of IT infrastructure needs including optimizing networks, improving cyber protection, deploying state-of-the-art communications and content archival solution, and desktop virtualization to reduce costs and improve availability and fault-tolerance of critical new infrastructure.
    • Illuminated financial insights by developing comprehensive analytics dashboards providing real-time access to key financial and operational results, supported by a robust data quality remediation program.
    • Developed the organization by benchmarking professional staff compensation against local and national peer groups, designed a performance management system that formalized roles and responsibilities of key positions, assessed functional leadership against available candidate pools, and conducted targeted executive recruiting to address key gaps in expertise.
  • Value capture. Implemented a variety of tactical projects to reduce costs and drive consistency and compliance including maximizing the recovery of client-related expenses, optimizing insurance coverage, consolidating and reducing travel expenses, automating workflows such as expense management, and standardizing processes such as conducting conflict of interest checks.

The Results

What appeared as a large undertaking became a very successful rejuvenation that will continue to yield benefits for the Firm and their clients. Preeminent LLP identified clear priorities for investment in practices and offices, and shifted staff and other resources accordingly. A new office was launched to expand the Firm’s reach to all key markets nationwide while also enhancing brand image and industry position. The Firm also embarked upon a public relations campaign to highlight its successes and capabilities with target audiences.

P&C led vendor selection, build-out, implementation, and training for three new platforms that transformed how the firm manages all expenses including vendors, employees, and client cost recovery – savings millions of dollars of annual costs and gaining millions of dollars of additional recoveries. These integrated platforms will reduce manual labor and waste and increase profitability for every practice. It also launched replacement efforts for document management and eDiscovery, and articulated a longer-term roadmap to upgrade the core practice management and financial system.

Additionally, P&C created and implemented a dashboard analytics platform that provides key decision makers with clear, actionable financial insights.

Preeminent LLP’s transformation rapidly accomplished all goals, delivering an impressive 515% return on investment in multiple of P&C fees over 11 months.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

International Airline Restructures Its Fleet to Lift Financial Results

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

FlagCarrier*, an international airline and national flag carrier of a global superpower, sought P&C’s guidance to assess options for its aging fleet and to determine best practices to boost growth. P&C determined the cost of owning a plane throughout its lifespan and found the optimal time to purchase and operate aircraft as well as the deployment economics to harness maximum value. P&C recommended restructuring the fleet, resulting in $150M in value created.

At a Glance


The Situation

FlagCarrier, a major international airline, had recently encountered financial challenges: reduced sales due to increased competition on international routes, increased fuel costs, and constraints on capital introduced to discourage acquisition of planes not manufactured domestically. In addition, focus on domestic and international business travelers revealed the importance of frequency share for each affected route and cost per plane mile versus cost per available seat mile.

To lift its financial results, the company needed to improve its fleet management which is a critical component of financial performance in the asset-intensive airline business.

FlagCarrier evaluated whether the company should proceed with exercising purchase options on 15-20 new long-haul aircraft and the impact and desirability of grounding up to 60 older, short to medium range aircraft. An added dimension to this consideration was that the potential new aircraft was manufactured overseas and existing aircraft targeted for retirement were domestically manufactured.

FlagCarrier sought P&C’s guidance to help assess these options and to provide an unbiased, detailed solution as part of an overall turnaround strategy.

Our Approach

P&C recommended restructuring the fleet and using a blended acquisition strategy, engaging both domestic and a single overseas manufacturer based on objective aircraft performance criteria essential to meeting industry benchmarks.

Given the tradeoffs between acquisition, operating, and maintenance costs, the optimal time to own/operate newly manufactured aircraft is during years 20-30 of their lifespan. With older, narrow-body aircraft in service well over 25 years and numerous, wide-body aircraft in service for 25-30 years–a restructuring of the fleet was needed.

Our Recommendations

Specific actions identified were to:

  • Consider optimal time to own and operate newly manufactured aircraft, turn down existing purchase option on one specific new plane which had the highest acquisition, ownership, and maintenance costs over its lifespan.
  • Ground and lease a costly type of plane currently in service.
  • Creatively restructure debt on the remaining planes in the fleet.
  • Creatively restructure overall relationship and contract with a domestic manufacturer to obtain specific performance characteristics sought for two narrow-body planes and redirect acquisitions for those planes to that manufacturer.
  • Consolidate acquisition of wide-body planes to an overseas manufacturer using industry benchmark performance requirements.

The Results

By implementing P&C’s recommendations, FlagCarrier realized $148M in annual savings; gained the improved reliability and customer satisfaction from a newer, more streamlined fleet; and leveraged a best-of-breed fleet strategy to maintain geo-political harmony.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

The Right Omnichannel Solution Lifts Results for Legendary European House of Fashion

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

CoutureCo*, a legendary European couture house, recognized its competitors were gaining tremendous market share from a new generation of buyers who were evaluating and ordering using mobile platforms. Merchandise assortment, availability, and logistics challenges hindered performance at a growing network of branded stores, further impacting customer perception and sales. The company sought P&C’s guidance to develop an effective omnichannel strategy and to optimize its logistics processes. With P&C’s expertise and support, the company developed and launched an integrated strategy which delivered a seven-fold increase in mobile revenue in one year.

At a Glance



The Situation

An effective omnichannel strategy presents retailers with a significant opportunity: The marriage of digital and physical worlds creates a whole new value equation and CoutureCo realized it needed the right strategy and a solid implementation effort to succeed. In today’s omnichannel world, the journey has more stages than ever, with the customer deciding not only where, when, and what to buy, but which channels to use and the role each will play. The linear route through the classic purchasing funnel has morphed into a fluid and dynamic process as boundaries between marketing and selling online and offline blur—and often disappear entirely.

CourtureCo’s historic success was due in large part to sales from their company branded stores as well as a carefully curated selection of luxury department stores. The company maintained disintegrated e-commerce channels (its own digital presence plus the digital presence of the luxury department stores), but its internal e-commerce and branded stores were not integrated.

E-commerce channel sales accounted for only 9% of its total revenue (compared to 30%+ enjoyed by its top-performing competitors) and often offered more discounted, off-season products or products for upcoming season not yet available for sale. Further, the company was hindered by inefficient logistics which led to unavailability of in-demand products and poor execution of direct-to-customer and direct-to-store orders which negatively impacted customer perceptions and satisfaction.

Our Approach

P&C worked closely with CoutureCo’s key project stakeholders–C-level leaders and stakeholders from across the company as well as their global logistics partner–to address key questions related to the company’s omnichannel opportunity:

  • How should pricing and assortment of the company’s online channel compare to its other channels including branded stores as well as omnichannel platforms of its other merchants?
  • What is the company open to do to realize the full potential of its omnichannel efforts?
  • What is the company open to do to in order to optimize assortment and logistics?

P&C led the key stakeholder team through a process to create a shared vision for the future state–a high-level roadmap, grounded in industry best practices and differentiating but attainable outcomes, which would represent the best outcomes from their omnichannel and logistics optimization efforts.

We established a targeted set of outcomes to define success. The targets included: mobile and online revenue increase of 2-3x and mobile users increase of 4-5x in one year from launch.

In addition, we created three cross-functional teams–led by P&C–to tackle the omnichannel strategy, development of the mobile platform, and logistics optimization workstreams.

Our Recommendations

The Results

With P&C’s expertise and implementation, CoutureCo’s omnichannel strategy, optimized global logistics solution, and investment in mobile delivered: 7x increase in mobile revenues and 10x increase in mobile engagement.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

Global Diversified Conglomerate Untethers Its Holdings to Unleash Growth

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

GlobalCo*, a diverse conglomerate with operations in 118 countries and over 160,000 employees worldwide, recognized that some of its portfolio companies were missing their profitability targets among other performance issues. The company sought P&C’s guidance to identify and solve the performance and profitability issues at its holding companies.

At a Glance



The Situation

GlobalCo, a diverse conglomerate with operations on five continents, owned businesses in multiple industries including logistics, biopharmaceuticals, commercial real estate development, energy and exploration, financial services, technology infrastructure, and luxury retail. GlobalCo’s board of directors had set a minimum rate of return for invested capital for their portfolio companies, but some fell below their goals. In addition, given the rapidly growing size and scale of some its portfolio companies, GlobalCo sought opportunities to share infrastructure across the enterprise to leverage its economies of scale and reduce duplicative costs. After evaluating and eliminating complex proposed solutions with unclear outcomes from multiple global consultancies, P&C was engaged to address the following challenges:

  • Identify which portfolio businesses have high potential for growth and scalability and those which need to be divested.
  • Identify issues tethering performance at high potential businesses and define strategies to boost performance at each.
  • Identify any low-hanging M&A opportunities for inorganic growth at high potential businesses.
  • Define a strategy and approach for the creation of a shared services organization to deliver common business services across the enterprise to include the following functions: finance, accounting, treasury, audit, technology infrastructure, human resources, risk management, and corporate real estate.

Our Approach

P&C worked closely with GlobalCo’s key stakeholders – C-level leaders and stakeholders from across the company and board of directors – to gather, consolidate, and prioritize the expected outcomes of the solutions sought.

With input from key client stakeholders, we created specific frameworks to address each challenge:

Our Recommendations

P&C’s top priority was to identify which of the underperforming businesses had potential for substantial growth and which needed to be divested. Concurrently, we wanted to identify potential opportunities to improve businesses already performing well along with potential M&A opportunities to scale those businesses to a new level.

The Results

GlobalCo divested all low-potential, non-performing businesses, made two strategic acquisitions valued over $7 billion, and created a state-of-the-art shared services organization which reduced $375 million in annual costs across all of its businesses. In addition, return on operating income increased from 12 to 27 percent over a 2-year period across all businesses.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

Major European Apparel Retailer’s Performance Improvement Boosts Shareholder Value

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

ApparelCo*, a European based apparel retailer with over 250 stores in 2 countries, sought P&C’s guidance to improve performance after missing earnings expectations for the first time, causing a significant share price decline.

At a Glance



The Situation

ApparelCo, a European apparel retailer with over 250 stores spanning 2 countries, had enjoyed rapid growth and was planning to more than double its store count within 3-5 years and diversify into new channels, products, and geographies. Despite its successful growth, the company had failed to meet its earnings expectations for the first time, causing significant share price decline. Investors blamed a variety of factors including concept saturation, under-performing new stores, and higher than expected operating costs. In addition, costs associated with a poorly timed rebranding effort had escalated dramatically and created customer confusion, negatively impacting sales.

ApparelCo asked P&C for answers to three questions:

  • How can we effectively lower our operating costs without sacrificing our growth aspirations?
  • What changes should we make to our product and pricing strategies to better align with our customers’ needs and expectations?
  • What changes do we need to make to save our rebranding initiative?

Our Approach

P&C worked closely with ApparelCo’s key project stakeholders—C-level leaders and stakeholders from across the company—to gather, consolidate, and prioritize the expected outcomes of the performance improvements sought.

First, we identified the company’s core strengths. Next, we conducted a thorough analysis of their costs and analyzed their sales data to identify performance impacting patterns. Upon fully understanding the costs and sales data, we articulated the company’s performance improvement options in detail.

Our Recommendations

P&C recommended six concurrent performance improvement initiatives to address ApparelCo’s issues. Working with the company’s key stakeholders, P&C led the execution of each of the concurrent workstreams.


Revenues

Marketing

  • Consolidated and refocused marketing spend
  • Targeted programs by segment to grow share of wallet and number of customers
  • Reprioritized R&D pipeline

Organization

  • Restructured field front line management
  • Created performance management and incentive system
  • Optimized store level staffing by store type

Key driver of comparative store sales out-performance (15% higher than retail industry average over multi-year horizon)

Products

Procurement

  • Centralized procurement function
  • Consolidated vendors
  • Renegotiated key contracts to reduce costs and improve terms
  • Developed strategic supplier relationships

Profitability

  • Assessed true profitability of all store level SKUs
  • Eliminated or re-priced 1800+ problem SKUs
  • Rationalized R&D spending

Drove €55M+ of annual savings after year one

Drove €12M of annual savings


Operations

People

  • Implemented store best practices
  • Enhanced store labor productivity by eliminating administrative work
  • Increased store level automation

Real Estate

  • Redefined store “full potential”
  • Evaluated store portfolio and identified optimal real estate economics
  • Improved efficiency in leasing, construction, repair and maintaince

Saved €38M in annual labor staffing costs

20% annual R&M savings and a 7% increase in new store ROI

The Results

P&C delivered €105M in annual cost savings and transformed key aspects of ApparelCo’s procurement, merchandising, marketing, real estate, and store operations which led to immediate and sustained revenue, cost, and competitive differentiation improvements. These outcomes created over €2.8 billion in shareholder value since the start of the engagement.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

Top 3 US Residential REIT Embraces Digital to Reduce Complexity & Advance Growth

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

REITCo*, one of the largest multi-family REITs with over 120 luxury apartment communities throughout the U.S., had a stellar reputation with its customers and investors. Its competitors had grown rapidly via acquisitions and were now extending their reach into REITCo’s key markets. The company sought P&C’s guidance to transform its business, internally, to better serve its customers and prepare for substantial growth via acquisitions.

At a Glance



The Situation

Although the multi-family REIT industry, as a whole, was not known for its innovative use of enterprise technologies including application software, customer-facing mobile and web solutions, and adoption of IoT/Smart building technology, senior leaders at REITCo had a larger vision in mind.

The company’s C-level leaders asked P&C for guidance on the following topics:

  • How do we effectively harness technology to both streamline our business AND differentiate ourselves from our top competitors?
  • How can we use technology to better engage our prospective and existing customers–both of whom are mostly higher-income, college-educated Millennials and GenX’ers with no children?
  • Can we make the investments we need to make–in technology, process innovation, and elsewhere–to create “acquisition bandwidth” (the ability to integrate acquired entities faster and more effectively)?
  • Can we successfully do all that we have identified in 2 years?

Our Approach

P&C created a 4-step approach to address the opportunity and overall business objectives.

Our Recommendations

P&C recommended 5 major components vital to meeting REITCo’s objectives:

  • Replace the existing and costly collection of 14+ disintegrated legacy enterprise applications with a single product suite from one vendor.
    • The accounting application was purchased and implemented 18 years earlier.
      • To compensate for its lack of modern capabilities, 7 other applications were purchased and bolted on over time to enable document scanning for accounts payable, electronic workflow, expense reporting, CapEx, vendor portal, risk management, and budget & forecasting.
      • Combined, these applications had created a company-wide epidemic of process complexity which often required both manual and semi-manual processes to reconcile and complete.
    • The prospective and current customer-facing applications were comprised of a compilation of various other third-party solutions which did not integrate to the back-office systems nor provided mobile solutions to the company’s sales professionals, service staff, or customers.
  • Revamp the existing company website and add the current set of functionality that prospective and existing customers expect.
    • The existing company website and resident portals were dated and they did not provide an appealing aesthetic to REITCo’s target customers. In addition, the existing website functionality lacked the full suite of online apartment home shopping, qualification, and move-in/move-out automation capabilities that their target market consumers expected (e.g. rental application, real-time decisioning, apartment unit reservation, digital tours and floor plans, move-in scheduling, deposit payment, etc.).
  • Develop and implement a social media strategy to recruit, engage, and retain prospective and existing customers and employees. 
    • Like many companies, REITCo had taken a cautious and gradual approach toward social media. Recruiting and retaining new employees and customers could benefit substantially from an active, focused, and engaged multi-channel social media presence.
      • Build a corporate presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram
      • Harness Facebook and Instagram to build and nurture a sense of community for customers at each of the properties and company-wide. Use Facebook’s powerful marketing capabilities to target and engage prospective customers.
      • Use LinkedIn Recruiter to precisely source talent–reducing the reliance and cost associated with external recruiters while gaining visibility and mindshare on the platform that likely hosts many existing and prospective customers.
      • Create and implement a social media policy to guide employees’ engagement online across the company’s new social media properties.
  • Add the talented resources needed in IT for the success of the Digital Reinvention Program. 
    • The IT team was highly dedicated and talented, but the team was understaffed and stretched thin. Additional talented resources were needed to give key existing resources the bandwidth necessary for the new initiatives.
  • Implement a change management program and governance process to guide the entire organization through the Digital Reinvention Program.

The Results

REITCo’s incredibly fast-paced deployment of its Digital Reinvention Program was a tremendous success. The legacy enterprise systems were replaced with a world-class product suite from one vendor. Concurrently, the new company website and its expansive prospective and existing customer portals were designed, developed, and launched. The unified corporate social media presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram were also designed, developed, and launched.

P&C led the vendor selection process for the company’s new enterprise application suite–using its partner ecosystem to engage C-level executives at each of the global software companies evaluated. This was to ensure REITCo had the highest level access to secure the most effective pricing and contractual negotiation outcomes.

P&C also led the design, development, and launch of REITCo’s new website, digital customer portals, and social media platforms.

REITCo’s Digital Reinvention program delivered impressive results on the three key measures the company’s leaders chose for the initiative: Same Store Sales (9% higher), Same Store Net Operating Income (12% higher), and total company revenues (11% higher excluding asset sales).

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

Major U.S. Health Insurer Uses Analytics to Reduce Claims Costs & Improve Medical Outcomes

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

With 25 years of medical claims and patient health outcomes data lying dormant in its databases, a major U.S. health insurer sought P&C’s recommendations on how to harness insights from its data to improve quality of care and reduce costs.

At a Glance



The Situation

InsureCo*, a major U.S. health insurance company serving millions of customers, wanted to harness its vast data warehouse containing hundreds of billions of processed medical claims and patient outcomes records to gain actionable insights into various opportunities. In particular, they wanted to reduce costs, identify new protocols to improve patient care results, identify fraud, and improve performance. Internal IT resources were fully dedicated to other major projects underway and competency in big data analytics did not exist within the organization. Several large technology and consulting firms were approached about this opportunity; however, their responses required massive financial commitments with multi-year project durations. This outcome would have been contradictory to the company’s stated objectives for a rapid proof-of-concept (POC) project and a roadmap to productize the platform across the company when fully completed. The company sought P&C’s recommendations and an action plan to meet its objectives.

Our Approach

P&C worked closely with the company’s project stakeholders–C-level leaders, Medical Management, Underwriting, Risk, Technology, Operations, and Finance–to gather, synthesize, and prioritize the expected outcomes using a value versus ease and capabilities analysis.

With project outcomes clearly defined and internal expertise and resource availability gaps in mind, together we agreed to an 18-month timeline to fully develop and implement the project. An initial forecasted target was set with an expectation of a $20-30M/year cost savings opportunity, net of all operating costs, that would support a fully productized solution.

Our Recommendations

P&C recommended five major project components:

  1. Use Agile methodology to create a rapid prototype of the platform, leveraging recently licensed analytics software and existing data warehouse to deliver a proof-of-concept; thereby, eliminating immediate investment in technology tools which may prove unnecessary based on POC outcomes.
  2. Concurrently, engage a team of healthcare economists to partner with the Medical Management team to identify the top 3 to 5 disease categories that are anticipated to provide the greatest potential for cost reduction and improved treatment outcomes.
  3. Use the POC platform to identify disease categories and actionable insights from 25 years of historic claims and outcomes data. Engage the expertise of healthcare economists to create the alternative medical management models that offered the best opportunities for both improved patient care and reduction in overall costs.
  4. Synthesize POC outcomes and the opportunities identified to create a business case for productizing and fully deploying the analytics platform inclusive of all associated costs.
  5. Extend the analytics platform functionality to address claims of fraud and to build a suite of proactive Medical Management capabilities designed to reduce catastrophic claims.

The Results

InsureCo is now one of the top industry leaders in big data analytics and its business outcomes are frequently showcased as industry best practices. The 18-month, rapidly paced project delivered $115M in annual savings, net of all associated costs—approximately 50 times P&C fees.

Proof of Concept

  • Introduced Agile development methodology to the company and engaged P&C’s partner ecosystem to deliver some of the best analytics and healthcare economics talent
  • Led the development of the POC prototype application
  • Led the process to identify the top 5 disease management categories with greatest potential as well as the alternative treatment protocols

Business Case

  • Led the creation of the business case—exceeding the original target of $20-30M/year in cost savings
  • Identified additional cost savings opportunities of $300M+/year to reduce claims fraud and proactive medical management protocols to reduce the recurrence of catastrophic claims

Productization

  • P&C led the development of the full analytics platform
  • Delivered a turnkey solution including the application, mobile functionality, and integrated medical management data models to capture the targeted savings
  • Using its Talent Acquisition expertise, P&C created an Analytics Competency Center for the company with a team of 48 people with deep expertise in the healthcare industry as well as Agile methodology, bid data analytics, health economics, and insurance fraud algorithmics—all new skillsets the company needed to expand the use of these capabilities

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

Major Luxury Retailer Transforms IT Operations to Embrace the Digital Age

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

LuxRetailCo*, a legendary luxury retailer, sought P&C’s guidance to evolve its IT capabilities and limited adaptability of existing technologies to meet evolving omnichannel and digital business needs.

At a Glance



The Situation

LuxRetailCo, a venerable brand with over 150 brick-and-mortar stores throughout North America, was looking for growth opportunities. The company’s historic growth model–opening new stores–had become ineffective in acquiring and retaining newer generations of customers. The company’s existing web and mobile channels were not integrated to the stores and delivered suboptimal customer experience and operational economics. Since consumers now expected a seamless omnichannel experience, the company needed to evolve its go-to-market approach to the digital age–doing so required developing its technology capabilities and a fundamental transformation of its IT operating model.

To transform its IT function to become a strategic asset and business partner, LuxRetailCo needed to address:

  • Complex, inflexible, and costly legacy systems and custom-developed applications which constrained agility and customer experience
  • Limited long-term view of technology architecture strategy, IT delivery strategy, and consumer-focused digital strategy
  • Highly siloed IT functions still in use from the 1990’s–engrained and partly necessitated by the costly legacy systems and custom applications dating back to the same era
  • Historical mindset of under-investment in foundational technologies
  • Lack of alignment and trust with the business partners that IT served

Our Approach

P&C worked closely with LuxRetailCo’s key project stakeholders–C-level leaders and stakeholders from across the company including IT–to gather, consolidate, and prioritize the expected outcomes of the transformation sought.

P&C led the key stakeholder team through a process to create a shared vision for the future state–a high-level capabilities roadmap, grounded in industry best practices and differentiating but attainable capabilities, which would represent the best transformation outcomes.

In addition, we established a targeted set of outcomes to define success. The targets included: revenue increase of 2-3% in year 1 and reduced IT infrastructure costs by $50-70M/year.

To ensure project success we:

  • Conducted a deep and thorough diagnostic of the IT organization and existing technologies to identify barriers to achieving full potential.
  • Defined and implemented prioritization and governance processes to align IT investments and capacity with business objectives.
  • Redesigned the IT operating model based on plan/build/run to increase role clarity and speed to market.
  • Facilitated and managed design, pilot, and implementation of omnichannel initiatives including:
    • In store Wi-Fi for customers and associates.
    • Deployment of mobile phones and tablets to all store associates for product lookup, availability, and mobile POS.
    • Integration of online and in-store clienteling platforms to enable a single view to the customer and their purchase history.
    • Omnichannel clienteling application on iPads to all store associates.
  • Defined sourcing strategy, capabilities, and organization.

Our Recommendations

P&C recommended five major transformation initiatives to fully enable the digital capabilities of LuxRetailCo:

  • Given the criticality and complexity of the transformation, which involved many highly interdependent workstreams and cross-functional teams, create a transformation governance function to:
    • Identify leadership and sponsorship for the change process throughout the company
    • Effectively communicate the transformation plan and progress
    • Continually assess the plan’s impact on the business to ensure proactive adjustments where needed
    • Embed the cultural and behavioral changes vital to success
  • Redesign the IT organization around an operating model that:
    • More effectively meets the needs of the internal customers and aligns functions and staff
    • Reduces fragmentation in current infrastructure and operational functions with clear accountability at all levels—especially for store and omnichannel technology operations
    • Fill key technology skillset gaps in Development, Project Management, Cyber Security, Capacity Planning, and Continuity
  • Create a Technology Program Office to manage business aspects of IT and its customer relationships including IT Procurement, IT Finance, Portfolio Management, and Operational Excellence
    • This includes a governance process to continually align and prioritize demand and supply of IT services based on business objectives
  • Build procurement capabilities around a clearly defined strategy which focuses on vendor performance, capabilities, and consolidation of spending power–where appropriate–to maximize leverage
    • Support execution through segmentation and rationalization of vendors
    • Link vendor contracts to deliverables, service levels, and effective outcomes
    • Reduce the number of vendors based on defined strategy and capabilities requirements to reduce complexity and associated costs
  • Retire complex and costly legacy applications by identifying available enterprise software applications which provide the necessary functionality
    • Evaluate existing third party software solutions to leverage the procurement strategy developed
    • Ensure that any new software suite selected integrates with existing ERP platform to mitigate integration and maintenance costs

The Results

LuxRetailCo has one of the best omnichannel capability suites in luxury retail–seamlessly integrating in-store, online, and mobile customer experience. The company’s IT function effectively restructured and embarked on an aggressive, 14-month process which delivered 4.5% in year-1 increased omnichannel sales and over $170M in annual IT infrastructure, maintenance, and rollout cost savings.

Capability Enablement

  • Reduced IT skillset and resource gaps to deliver critical projects
  • Delivered in-store and online capabilities essential for a seamless, omnichannel customer experience
  • Reduced in-store IT infrastructure costs by 50% by rolling out mobile technologies with fully integrated clienteling functionality
  • Delivered an effective, secure, and redundant in-store network solution for both customers and associates

Solution Design

  • Identified existing enterprise software capabilities, which integrated seamlessly with the ERP platform, and replaced costly legacy applications–saving $40M in annual operating costs
  • Identified the governance methodology and processes to ensure IT initiatives remain in-tune and proactively aware of ever-changing business requirements

IT Organizational Effectiveness

  • Implemented new IT organization and governance model
  • Acquired the talent needed to fill the company’s key skillset gaps in IT–essential to the enduring success of the initiatives implemented
  • Rationalized the complex portfolio of over 150 IT labor and infrastructure vendors, from the ground up, including renegotiating and restructuring costly multi-year contracts with telecommunications, hosting, and other providers–saving over $65M in annual operating costs
  • Created the IT procurement competency within the new organization to enable ongoing success

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

Global News Org Revamps IT & Procurement Models to Improve Performance, Reduce Costs

Written by Markitects on . Posted in Client Outcomes.

Proven Results

With its existing IT capabilities and technology’s limited adaptability to meet evolving omnichannel and digital business needs, a breaking news leader sought P&C’s help to improve performance and reduce costs.

At a Glance



The Situation

NewsCo*, a globally recognized leader in providing breaking news and high quality, omnichannel content and content dissemination technologies, was looking for pragmatic, exacting solutions to reduce its operating costs without breaking its long-standing social contract with its global workforce. The costs associated with newsgathering and content dissemination technologies had skyrocketed during the proceeding 5 years. Major investments were made in developing and evolving content gathering and dissemination platforms, but business requirements were outpacing IT’s ability to deliver. Platform reliability and scalability grew increasingly complex and unreliable despite ever increasing investments. In addition to escalating IT costs, the revenue impact from existing and emerging competitors created both P&L and balance sheet pressures prompting NewsCo to request P&C’s help in evaluating and identifying realistic solutions, where possible.

Our Approach

P&C worked closely with NewsCo to identify a focused list of priority areas for cost reduction, to quantify the potential savings opportunity, and to map out the process and structural work effort required to obtain the most effective outcomes. Together, we agreed to a 9-month timeline from the beginning of the project to full implementation of structural changes and an initial conservative forecast of $25-30M/year cost savings opportunity.

To accomplish this, we:

  • Identified the cost areas with the greatest potential for improved performance outcomes and reduced costs: IT, Procurement, Telecommunications, and Employee Benefits.
  • Conducted a deep analysis of each of the priority cost reduction areas to understand the current state and identify the barriers to achieving full potential.
  • Engaged and worked with C-level leaders to establish agreement and joint ownership of the overall plan which was essential for long-term success. Given the organization’s rich legacy and its vast global scale, engendering cultural change was critical and vital to overall success.
  • Assembled, led, and educated a cross-functional leadership team, accountable to NewsCo for effective delivery of the targeted savings, to get them emotionally invested in the effort and outcomes.
  • Created and implemented a set of prioritization and governance processes and a performance dashboard to align cost reduction efforts with business objectives.
  • Assembled and led individual work teams to deliver the transformative cost reductions targeted from each of the identified cost areas.

Our Recommendations

P&C recommended four major transformation initiatives to deliver the performance improvements and cost reductions sought by NewsCo:

  • Outsource the IT functions which are non-strategic to NewsCo and can be done more effectively externally–improving reliability, scale, and time-to-market for the development of new revenue generating and differentiating technologies.
  • Leverage the infrastructure and telecommunications buying power of a global outsourcer to consolidate and reduce associated expenses and gain access to new technologies and service levels inaccessible to NewsCo.
  • Transform the procurement function and eliminate the ad-hoc, departmental buying practices to consolidate, gain proactive visibility to spending, and maximize negotiating power with vendors across the globe, including:
    • Implementation of previously licensed procurement module from SAP to streamline procurement processes, automate routine activities, and enable real-time integration with financial systems.
    • Implementation of a new organizational model for procurement, identification of talent requirements, and delivery of recruiting services which added core competencies essential to enduring success.
  • Use a private healthcare exchange to provide more robust health, dental, vision, and prescription insurance coverage for the two largest groups of employees and retirees, reduce associated operating costs, and gain a substantial, one-time reduction in balance sheet liabilities.

The Results

During a fast-paced 9-month engagement, P&C provided a robust set of enduring outcomes enabling NewsCo to meet its business needs for years to come. The results included annual savings of $86M, which was approximately 55 times P&C’s fees.

  • Reduced IT and telecommunications operations costs and capital requirements by outsourcing non-strategic functions to deliver $60M/year in operating savings.
  • Transformed procurement organization, new talent, and enabling processes to deliver $20M/year operating savings.
  • Rebid the group health insurance program and led the process and contract negotiations to completion–delivering both improved coverage and benefits while reducing annual operating expenses by $6M/year and $25M reduction of balance sheet liabilities.

Outsourcing non-core business functions are now part of NewsCo’s culture and best practices. NewsCo transformation stakeholders–both C-level executives as well as the hundreds of employees across all individual work teams–took ownership of the goal, the significant efforts, and the tremendous accomplishments.

*We take our clients’ confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

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