Speed. Precision. Performance.
Managing existing product portfolio products and conceiving, developing, and marketing category-changing products that consumers crave has long been the lifeblood of leading companies in the food and beverage sector. Capitalizing on innovations isn’t easy. But in this industry, it is critical for companies that aim for a financially sustainable innovation pipeline, for consumers who seek a steady stream of new products that satisfy new needs, and for retailers that hope to benefit from greater demand for new and existing products.
Meanwhile, raw materials, energy, and food commodity prices are rising steadily. Yet many companies simply cannot translate price pressures on their operation into higher prices in the market. For high profile brands especially, a series of price rises could be enough to trigger a permanent consumer shift to cheaper options. The food and beverage industry has also seen an explosion in the number of SKUs available to customers. As a result, an individual product has a shorter life cycle, resulting in increased manufacturing turns and changeovers, multiple packaging configurations and high inventory.
ARGO-EFESO applies a holistic transformation approach by combining and enhancing some of the worlds best operational tools and philosophies. We understand how operations support business strategy.
Our approach helps industrial service clients focus operations for better alignment with strategy. This achieves sustainable results by:
- Maximizing operational effectiveness, using what they have better rather than making additional costly investments
- Improving quality to minimize waste
- Reducing order to cash cycles, whether attaching order entry, process times, inventories, or accounts payable
- Rationalizing SKUs and using portfolio management to focus on the most profitable products and product families
- Designing products to improve total delivered cost to market
- Rationalizing facility and integrating supply chain networks
- Using training and follow-up techniques to ensure that desired behaviors such as safety and customer service practices become ingrained in the organizational culture
Our global team of consultants has a depth of technical operations expertise and a proven track record of leading and implementing successful transformations. Our people bring a wide range of professional experience from some of the most operationally excellent companies in the world.
We diagnose areas of waste, variability, and inefficiency in the operating system and then redesign, and implement, not just the new production system, but also the management structure that improves the bottom line and ensures accountability and sustainability. By working hand-in-hand with our client’s employees, we ensure the buy-in from the senior leadership team all the way to the front line employee, leaving behind a new culture, mindsets, and behaviors.
We look deeply and broadly, not just at operational processes, but also into all functions and dynamics to leverage opportunities for improvement, including R&D, Marketing & Sales, supplier influences, inventory, setup reduction, standard work, back office and interfaces between departments.