Mark Kesler

The Accunomics team assembled at the client site today. Reviewed our objectives, deliverables, workstreams, and the client’s business. Attended presentations from the client. The team went out to a drinking dinner (!) with the entire client management team (traditional Chinese/Korean/Japanese way of getting to know each other) – great fun, although we tried our best […]

Conducted interviews with client leadership. Varying levels of support for the work we’re about to do, making for some challenges we’ll need to address and overcome. Consulting is never straightforward and this engagement will not be.

We’re going to be analyzing the entire business, including marketing, pricing, discounting, contracting, as well as operating expenses and transportation. Our first step was to establish a profitability model and tie it to their historical financials as well as begin the analysis of their overall performance. The initial analysis seems pretty clear: operating expenses are […]

Preparing for our first update. This includes a review of their financial performance – the overview, which reviews financials they already generally know, and some analyses from the profit model, which is already telling us things the client doesn’t really know, such as at least 50% of their customers are either unprofitable or only marginally […]

Delivered the first update – we’re slowly gaining respect from client management as they can see we’re providing information about their business they haven’t had before. We’re now on to our next step – to demonstrate that greater rigor and transparency in pricing and financials will improve profits.

Continuing our research and analyses and preparing for our second update. Also beginning to meet with the President of the Division and executives from parent company. It’s great that this type of engagement allows us to meet with high level executives. This is big stuff that’s worth big money and executives are interested. We continue […]

Preparing for our second update and working with the client teams to keep them informed. We’re supplementing our financial analyses with work process definitions and outside research. I’m keeping the team on track and working with all the leads on a daily basis. Also working with the client project manager to keep her informed as […]

Gave our second update. The client is becoming convinced that there is pricing dispersion and other types of “profit leaking” behavior. This indicates there is not rigor, detail, and process in pricing, leading to randomness, dispersion, and profit leaks. We’re also showing that transportation rates can be reduced via competitive bidding. Developing a relationship with […]

Preparing for the third update now, bringing in business case elements and demonstrating how much money can be saved. The client is now pushing back a bit as they don’t want to commit to a benefits number. This requires more discussions with client management. Consulting is complex and requires multiple skills ranging from analysis to […]

Delivering our third update and beginning to wrap things up. It’s time for an Accunomics tradition: building the ‘Brown Paper’ (a.k.a. the Horse Blanket). For visual effect, we’re mounting all the key PowerPoint slides from the projects on a wall-sized slab of packing paper. I was a little skeptical at first, but it really is […]