Operations

Financial volatility, new political environments, and the pressure to meet constantly evolving customer needs are just a few of the factors putting demands on today’s businesses. To move forward, innovation is key. What is your plan to integrate the right strategies and ensure that your organization, your products, and business models keep up—and keep their competitive edge?

Our teams are experts in creating tailor-made solutions that face disruptive realities head-on. This may impact your technology strategy or portfolio management. We help our clients make well-rounded decisions on modular or frugal products and advise global companies on optimal R&D-footprints as well as lead or lean engineering. Whether boosting your overall innovation strategy, or focusing on increased product value and time-to-market efficiency, we work with you to create a culture that fosters innovation at all levels of your organization, from your business model to process and people.

Global purchasing, best cost country sourcing, E-2-E supply chain management, and manufacturing in the plant of the future have all become more complex than ever before—and not only in the context of Industry 4.0. This means that agility is the key to effective and competitive business in tomorrow's digital environment. How can you manage the new challenges of heavy workloads, high costs, and quality demands while raising the bar to achieve increased overall excellence in your operations?

At Roland Berger, our experts excel at client solutions like advanced impact sourcing, supplier risk management, as well as volatility management and the "lean" philosophy, just to mention a few. We bring years of experience to the table to offer purchasing and manufacturing solutions as well as best-practice strategies to keep your supply chain agile and your footprint competitive. Working with your organization, we develop customized approaches for ongoing change that will optimize the way you do business.

Today’s uncertain markets mean that value is a critical factor in your organization’s decisions, and at every level of operations. You need strategies that work in the here-and-now, but that also take a wider view and offer flexibility for the future. To boost competitiveness, your company needs to find the right balance between the long-term and the short.

Our experts believe in a philosophy we call Continuous Improvement. If, on the other hand, you favor bolder decisions, we can help you transform your operating model while innovating your business model. Our experts are skilled at tailoring the value chain to meet your current and future business needs. This may entail maintenance excellence for some clients, or CapEx containment for others. With our experience developing and transferring best practices across industries, we can help you adapt to technological and structural changes and secure higher returns and accelerated cash rotation.

Volatile, fast-paced business environments mean that optimizing for sustainability is part of tomorrow’s optimal performance equation. You want to integrate innovative, tried-and-tested practices to ensure that your internal structure is built to last. Yet, many companies are left with the same questions. What are the first steps? And, what role do customer and business partner services play?

At Roland Berger, we take a comprehensive approach to sustainability. Working with your organization, we address issues of competency and talent management to accelerate change where necessary. We can help you optimize lean support functions, improving overhead effectiveness and efficiency. Our strategies are designed to ride out periods of uncertainty. We also believe that service excellence is the key to long-term business partner and customer relationships, and we are innovators in the field. Our experts can assist your company in the implementation of value-adding practices that reduce risk and increase competitiveness, now and for the future.

A vertical integration strategy aims at value chain design, identifying core competencies and conducting make-or-buy decisions.

A detailed understanding of manufacturing technologies, including innovations such as additive manufacturing, entire process chains and total cost is required to define a holistic manufacturing strategy.

Digitalization is a key issue when it comes to strategy definition. Roland Berger has a proven track record in supporting manufacturing companies in introducing digital production.

Our global footprint design approach helps companies to strategically optimize their production setup.

Roland Berger offers an integrated method that determines the most suitable location for new production sites and ensures a timely relocation.

From our understanding establishing smart production systems builds on two pillars: defined maturity levels and a proven implementation process.

The Roland Berger 360° Assessment is a combination of our Rapid Plant Assessment based on lean principles and our Industrie 4.0 factory audit. The tool allows a holistic analysis of the current plant performance with focus on lean maturity and readiness for digital production. The assessment gives a detailed feedback to team and management.

Our site restructuring method combines an in-depth assessment of cost reduction options with sustainable implementation management.

In our factory planning projects, we enable our clients to take the right decisions for their digital factories of tomorrow, while building on our extensive project experience and access to expert know-how.

In addition, we offer a proven 4-step framework for lean production and structured approaches regarding Continuous Improvement (CI), quality performance and ramp-up management.

We also support our clients in creating key enablers to optimize their production: Organization, leadership and culture, a well-trained Project Management Office, a capable IT-infrastructure and supporting performance benchmarks.