A major organisational transformation at an Australian Building Society. This work started with a comprehensive review of the organisation’s historical performance, competitive positioning and capabilities. The review covered all aspects of the Society’s market offer, from customer and product profitabilities, down to the account level, through to brand values and customer perceptions. An over-arching strategic position was developed in a joint Board-Senior Management workshop. We then worked with the senior management team to develop detailed strategies and implementation plans. The transformation included seeding of new talent at mid and senior levels of the organisation, substantial transformation of the nature and footprint of the branch network, development of new products and a reinvigoration of the brand.

Our team worked very closely with both the Board and the CEO during this engagement, attending Board meetings and utilising some of the very specific knowledge and capabilities of Directors in the process. We helped our client recruit a program manager to run the implementation, and assisted in briefing specialist external providers of market research and communications services. While the overall benefits will more than double return on equity, implementation has been planned to deliver cash positive benefits within the first six months.

A large, private company had built a dominant East Coast position in one specific segment of the building products industry. They had recently experimented with a new product that could potentially deliver a new growth platform, but the results to date had been unsatisfactory and there was disagreement at Board level on the next steps. We examined the opportunities in the market, identified strengths and weaknesses in the distribution network as well as in production and in organisation design. Working closely with both senior management and the board, we developed a marketing plan and organisation specification that would substantially strengthen the firm’s efforts in this sector. Subsequently, a manager was hired to oversee the entry into the new product and market segment, and we helped that manager integrate into the new role.  In the year following presentation of the Plan the firm achieved 25% growth in new product sales and are now working towards doubling sales within three years.

Detailed profitability analysis and market segmentation. We helped this health insurer develop its first detailed view of customer and product profitability, on both a marginal and fully allocated basis. In the course of the work, we identified high and low performing customer segments, which were then related to existing market research to enable development of improved offers. Additionally, substantial improvement opportunities were identified and then realised in claims management, branch operations and other areas of the company.

A chemicals company was experiencing a major decline in profitability, with ongoing loss of customers, and in turn, sales. The company sold in excess of 13,000 SKUs and in excess of 3,000 customers, via a complex matrix of product and sales groupings. ARPOS was engaged to assess profitability of product groups. This project required full allocation of costs across product groups and provided visibility to profitability at the product group level for the first time. Unprofitable groupings were eliminated where turnaround options were not viable, while increased support was provided to profitable products and product groups.

For the same company, ARPOS was charged with improving the on time performance of delivery of product to customers. Our Team led the upstream work focused on improving on time delivery from suppliers. Working daily with internal teams and focusing on the root cause of each delivery “failure”, Procurement IFOT failures were reduced by over 50%, and in turn, customer IFOT performance improved from ~85% to 98%. Importantly, this performance was sustained in the 12 months following the completion of project activity.