IS HIRING AN OPERATIONS CONSULTANT THE RIGHT MOVE FOR YOU?

Putting a practicing operations consultant under the microscope, it’s clear that the term describes  a professional who provides strategic and operational advice to organizations to help them improve business performance, productivity, efficiency, and profitability. While it’s not always the case, often you’ll find that operations consultants are typically experts in analyzing an organization’s core operations, business processes, and value chains for opportunities to increase efficiency.

The work of top experts centers around assessing and enhancing how companies effectively manage resources, activities, equipment and technology to produce and deliver products and services. By conducting thorough reviews of supply chain logistics, production systems, workflows, resource allocation, and technology infrastructure, operations consultants identify issues impeding smooth operations and highlight areas for improvement.

A consulting advisor may be brought in to advise organizations on crucial decisions like determining optimal manufacturing capacity, restructuring organizational processes, developing supply chain sustainability practices, or implementing automation technology. The target here is to streamline operations to reduce waste, minimize costs, increase flexibility, improve quality control, and drive faster delivery of finished products.

To do so, operations consultants utilize quantitative data and qualitative insights to inform their evaluations and recommendations. Through collecting production statistics, observing organizational processes, and interviewing key staff, consultants pinpoint bottlenecks, excess costs, technology gaps and other deficiencies. The consulting leaders then analyze findings, model solutions, outline benefits of suggested changes, and guide organizations through making enhancements.

Critical skills and competencies for effective operations consultants include analytics, business acumen, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, synthesis and process evaluation abilities. Strong advisors must also stay on top of emerging technologies and best practices while tailoring solutions to an organization’s unique operations landscape, goals and culture.

With an operations consultant’s clever advice, know-how and support, organizations can maximize productivity and performance. Outside expertise equips companies to turn operations into a competitive advantage and engine to accelerate business growth both in the immediate and long term. Even small operational changes recommended by skilled consultants can lead to major improvements in the bottom line.