Importance of Management Consulting for Manufacturers

3. Mergers & Acquisitions

Has your organization either merged with another organization? or has it acquired a new company? Therefore, you need to check if you dealing with redundancies where too many employees perform the job of one person, a system for each process? Do organizational silos exist? And lastly, are there unreasonable expectations that need to be delivered?

4. Customer/client demands

Customer demand is majorly segmented based on numerous factors such as lead times that are shorter, ordering patterns that are random, and greater shipping flexibility, while new paradigms for customer service are birthed out of the “right product- right quantity – right documentation – right condition – right place – right time” mantra and residing with these new paradigms traditionally needs a step-change not only in the process but also system complexity.

5. Partnerships & Alliances

As the working environment grows and business becomes really difficult to scale, the alliances lead to or serve as one of the means to achieve greater success. Organizations/firms that form either alliances or partnerships are required to have strong collaboration and effective implementation of common as well as isolated systems and procedures. Therefore, all of these become more complex and difficult to obtain, now.

Meeting the expectations of manufacturers

One of the factors that we need to consider before providing the right solutions is to check if the poor product line management has sub-optimized the manufacturing operations? Secondly, we should also examine if it can create reactive production and distribution planning, with high operating costs and manufacturing resources that are not utilized effectively.

In manufacturing, it is highly critical to find out the root causes and promote continuous improvement efforts in order to be efficient as well as responsive as per the business requirements. Most often we only look at what we control such as the shop floor, the manufacturing environment, the plant, our focused factory, and many others, however, it is significant to go out of the boundaries that you are familiar with and rather focus on the broader organization for inefficiency drivers.

One of the major root causes for poor operational performance is Product line management that is managed inconsistently - without consideration of how products are effectively manufactured.
In case you are not conducting/performing formal reviews of the portfolio, it may be leading to the creation of operational inefficiencies, rise in the cost of goods, compromise production capacity, etc. Therefore, how can you sort through it all and how do you lead change outside of your segment?

Hence here are four important steps to consider for establishing a cross-functional, collaborative product line management in order to spark the effect of product rationalization:

1. Gain clarity on your sales and marketing strategy

2. Understand how the sales and marketing strategy is converted to units

3. Perform a detailed product line analysis

4. Implement the results

Conclusion

Product rationalization should be taken as the first/starting point while looking for operational improvement - together with among various critical/key functions such as sales, marketing, engineering, production, etc. because it leads to a balanced, synergetic focus on blending the needs and requirements of the business with its capabilities, capacity, and resources as well.

Leveraging your production/manufacturing capability via the interrelationship of the key business functions/tasks with regards to product line management helps in the identification of those products providing the best combination such as volume potential, business fit as well as margin contribution which helps in removing underperforming non-strategic products.