Transcript Berling Associates Overview

Berling Associates
Assisting Clients To Redefine How The Game Is Played
An Overview
Berling Associates – Assisting Clients To Redefine How The Game Is Played
Who We Are
Berling Associates is a management consulting firm that assists organizations to redefine how to play the
game. We accomplish this by assisting companies to improve performance through effective use of their
resources and relationships. Our approach is driven always by an overview of the business issues and the
goals of our clients. Our purpose is to get to the heart of the issues, solve problems and assist with the
implementation of change.
Business is different today. There are continuing and rapid changes in the character and motivation of
customers, heightened global aspirations of suppliers, and a new breed of employee. All these elements
pose challenges of tremendous consequence. To succeed managers need to: understand and respond
precisely to targeted customers, streamline all business processes – internally and in the channel, eliminate
time and cost from the business equation, and build enduring profitable relationships with employees,
customers and suppliers. To accomplish all of this, managers will often seek outside assistance. The
associates of Berling Associates, very likely, can help.
Our senior associates have over 25 years experience consulting. Their projects have ranged from strategic
planning, to business process reengineering, to customer- and product-market potential and profitability
analysis, to purchasing and inventory management practices evaluation, to the development of operations
performance measures, to the evaluation and development of organization, team and individual
capabilities, and to the conceptualization and negotiation of strategic partnerships. Berling Associates’
focus is in the service, healthcare, distribution, assembly, publishing and retail industries.
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Services - Supply Chain
The last two decades have delivered the notion of mass customization to the business environment with
a hard landing. Mostly gone are the markets with large segments of homogeneous customers with
identical needs and wants. The raw materials components of many products have stayed basically the
same. However, the number of end variations of the final products have proliferated exponentially over
the years. This proliferation in product dimensions such as style, color, packaging, bundling, shape, etc.
has put tremendous stress on companies’ supply chains. Many claim this increase in the number of end
products has brought a whole new focus to supply chain activity management. Companies are now
looking to their supply chain managers to improve margins and to improve asset utilization.
Berling Associates provides a deep and rich mix of services and tools to assist companies to better
manage their supply chains. It has been assisting companies over the last decades transition their
thinking from the silos of warehouse management, purchasing management, sales planning, order entry
management, work/production scheduling and transportation management into a coordinated view of
integrated supply chain management activities. The result of these many projects have been companies
with more agility, greater responsiveness, and the ability to more effectively and efficiently redefine
how the play the game.
Inventory Management
Sales/Service Analysis
Purchasing Management
Activity Cost/Value Analysis
Warehouse Cost Management
3PL Analysis
Cargo Management
Supplier Management
Customer/Supplier Surveys
Site Location Analysis
Logistics Network Optimization
Decision Support Systems
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Services – Business Process Management
The last twenty years have seen significant changes in the way companies do business. Competitive
environments have changed due to technology advances and/or product innovations. However, the advances or
innovations typically did not cause the company to win or lose. The battle was won or lost based on how well
the companies executed in the changing environment. That, is how well they redefined their businesses to
respond to changing market conditions. A number of very high profile companies have been caught up in these
changes and have lost or won based on execution. Several examples include: Eastern Airlines, Southwest
Airlines, Kodak, Canon, Montgomery Ward, Target, and the list goes on.
We believe that managing an organization’s ideas and process has become as important as managing its money.
Organization’s must now optimize people and the way in which their people work and convert their ideas into
profitable actions. At the core of how to accomplish this are the tools of our business process management
practice.
Process Analysis, Simplification and Integration
Customer Process Integration
Business Process Management
Supplier Process Integration
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Services – Measurement Tools
Significant resources, financial and human, have been expended over the last 10 years to assist
companies in finding competitive advantage through information. Companies have heavily invested
in ERP systems, data warehouses, analytical business cubes, etc. in their quest to convert data into
actionable information for their people. Many of these investments have been frustrating for
companies, since the returns on their investments have been illusory.
Most every aspect of our work with our clients has a measurement component, if measurement is
not the focus of the engagement. Our work in the area of measurement is always undertaken within
the context of a business objective. Always underlying the accumulation of the data to be measured
is the conversion of the data to information. This is one step in the process to make information
actionable by its users. We frequently use web-based technology to display the intelligent views
into the data that we create with our clients.
Activity Based Costing
Product Line Profitability
Customer Impact Management
Key Business Metrics
Cash Flow Analysis
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Services - Strategy
Since its inception, the practice of business strategy has focused on applying micro-economic theory to
gain competitive advantage, thereby superior profitability. Initially, the search for advantage focused on
economies of scale, experience curves and economies of scope through synergy. Over time, the search for
advantage evolved toward a more refined analysis of production costs and more sophisticated market
segmentation. The importance of enduring profitable customer relationships then become a focus of
attention, and companies have begun to think of defining their strategies from the point of view of the
customer, looking backward through the value chain of activities that are required to keep that desired
customer satisfied and profitable over the years.
With this increased understanding of what drives value in organizations, came the realization that
functionally integrated, process linked team structures, along dimensions that matter most to customers, are
superior to traditional functional/departmental structures. It was found that team structures were less costly;
they provide more reliable and faster delivery; they produce fewer defects; and, they facilitate more rapid
introduction of new products.
We have assisted many organizations, in identifying, evaluating and implementing strategic opportunities
for change, as they continue to redefine how they play the game. Berling Associates services and tools mix
includes assistance in the following areas:
Strategic Assessment
Market Analysis
Customer Analysis
Acquisition Evaluation
Strategic Alliances
Competitor Evaluations
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Services – Data Mining
The volume of data stored and maintained by businesses has reached staggering sizes in recent years.
Many companies have databases that range in size into terabytes; that is more than 1,000,000,000,000
bytes of data. When we use the term data, we mean low level transaction data down to the number of
records and the number of fields in the record. These records are: POS transactions, SKUs in an Item
Master, payment transaction history in an accounts receivable file, journal entries in a general ledger,
etc.
Unfortunately, many companies only view there data in a traditional sense. That is, they take their data
from their various applications and generate reports, tables and graphs of what happened in the past,
i.e. they create retrospective views. They answer specific questions with these views: How many
accounts were opened last month? Which products sold in greater quantities this month versus last
month? Did we meet or exceed our budget this year?
Data mining is the data-driven discovery and modeling of hidden patterns in large volumes of data.
Data mining differs from the traditional methods because it produces models that capture and represent
hidden patterns in the data. With data mining the user can discover patterns and build models
automatically without knowing exactly what he is looking for. A user can pose "what-if" questions to a
data mining model that cannot be queried directly from the database or warehouse; for example: What
is the expected lifecycle profitability of every product? Which customers will switch their phone
service if we introduce new fees? Companies are using this information to increase revenues and
reduce costs.
Berling Associates provides a full array of data mining services to companies for use in their efforts to
convert data to information.
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Description Of Consulting Services
The focus of Berling Associates' projects includes those that are external, internal and in-between. We work
within the four walls of a company assisting with issues related to process: getting something from point A
to point B, without regard to what that something is, i.e., paper, people, inventory, etc. Our work in business
process reengineering and process simplification provides more than a technical solution. We also bring a
strong consideration of the human element within the business process change and a consideration of the
underlying dynamics required for successful implementation.
Outside the four walls, our projects for clients focus on their relationships with customers. We assist
companies in understanding: who their customers are, who their customers should be, what their customers
want, and how they are doing in satisfying their customers. All of these aspects of the customer relationship
are considered when determining how to optimize the profit potential within each relationship over time.
Our customer satisfaction work is always framed within the context of financial performance. These same
notions regarding profitable customer relationships are applied to the supplier relationships of our clients.
The in-between aspect of our consulting services has to do with transactions between businesses. The
business process interface between companies and the reengineering or simplification of those processes is
gaining greater interest. Many companies are shifting away from transaction-based thinking. They are trying
to develop a cost advantage through establishing long-term relationships with customers and suppliers. The
notion of strategic partnership has moved beyond trying to identify synergies in R&D or marketing, to
trying to reduce the cost of doing business together. The linkage between activities, such as in the area of
billing at one partner and accounts payable at the other partner, has been identified as a cost saving
opportunity and as a potential area for the creation of a barrier to competitors.
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Management - Rob Berling
Rob is one of the true experts in channel dynamics and process reengineering. His client consulting
experience includes projects in market strategy, product and service pricing, purchasing strategy,
organization structure redefinition, cost identification and containment, and productivity improvement.
He has assisted companies in bringing a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign to their business
processes achieving dramatic improvements in cost, service, quality and speed.
Rob’s thinking on strategic relationships among channel members is featured in an article published in
BUSINESS HORIZONS magazine, The Emerging Approach to Business Strategy: Building a
Relationship Advantage. Rob has leveraged his consulting experience in channel dynamics and strategic
alliances to contribute significantly to a path-breaking study by the Health Industry Distributors
Association entitled Stockless Materials Management -- How It Fits Into The Healthcare Puzzle. Rob has
also drawn on his experience to author or contribute significantly to a number of other publications.
During Rob's twenty-five years of consulting he has pioneered the development of practical frameworks
for companies to solve business problems. For example, one of these is used to understand the true costs
of products, the nature of the activities delivering those products, and how those activities may be
streamlined, focused or eliminated. Another framework helps companies link specific customer wants to
the activities performed by the companies, allowing them to more precisely identify value and non-value
added activities.
Prior to 1991, Rob was a partner in Arthur Andersen & Co. He held a number of leadership positions
within the Business Consulting practice. Rob’s client base spanned a wide range of industries to include:
distribution, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, assembly and technology. His innovative approaches to
solving client challenges were used as the bases for a number of firm-wide initiatives such as activity
based costing, customer focused activity analysis, and supply chain management.
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Contact Us
Rob Berling
Berling Associates
550 Pharr Road, Suite 212
Atlanta, GA 30305
tel. 404.365.9836 ♦♦♦ fax. 404.365.9837
www.berlingassociates.com
[email protected]
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