OpportunityOur client is the family owned holding firm of several manufacturing companies, producing sophisticated metal components for large, globally operating capital equipment and durable goods manufacturers, including automotive and machinery. Rapid growth and substantial demand for its services over the past had resulted in certain commoditization of the client’s products, significant price pressure from off-shore competitors threatened important customer relations, and gradually eroded some of the previously exclusive technical and innovation leadership of some of the firm’s operating companies.
Action
TransAdvantage was asked to assist in a fundamental strategic review of the company’s overall positioning. We started with an in-depth assessment and research, developing comprehensive internal and external SWOT-analyses, conducted customer and supplier focus groups and surveys to ascertain the fundamental strength. We reviewed internal processes, sales and channel strategies, the engineering systems and the communication and logistics chains; we evaluated marketing and communications. We agreed that a potential restructuring of the various operating companies, and an overall repositioning of the performance program may maximize the company’s overall strength, while minimizing shortcomings and limitations at the same time.
Result
The client restructured certain elements of the individual operating companies into a more customer, application and market focused alignment of strategic business units, creating highly synergistic product and service portfolios along specific vertical market segments. We helped create an new, overall “umbrella” position and uniform corporate identity for the holding firm, which created synergistic effects across all customer groups. The company streamlined many internal processes, strengthened the sales and marketing efficiency, eliminating redundancies and deploying freed-up resources to new business development. Stagnating revenues over the previous 5 years have turned into an average growth of 11% p.a. over the past 3 years, operating margins have increased even more.
We would be glad to share details of our work without identifying the client’s name or specifics which would allow identification of the company or its competitors.
