Providing guidance and Directional Strategy to the engineering division

The client entered into a strategic joint venture with a foreign company offering end-to-end services from management consultancy to executing turnkey projects up to 2012. The company faced several challenges in the form of a partner’s exit, slow-down in the economy and lack of adequate policy reforms. The company wanted to assess its readiness to initiate a joint venture partner search and formulate a future growth strategy.

A team was structured with a mix of specialist on business processes assessment, competency mapping, industry experts, business leaders and management consultants.

This team enabled us to quickly segment the problems in different modules and carry out an ‘as-is’ assessment of the company.

The ‘as-is’ assessment of key architectural services and competency mapping of key personnel staff were carried out to understand the status quo of the organisation. The assessment was divided among the following three work-streams:

Process

Lack of comprehensive compliance and monitoring program in each department for project execution was observed. Low level of documentation for key factors such as stress calculation, engineering change management, weight calculation were observed during the assessment.

People

Lack of motivation among employees was realized during the assessment. Goals and key performance indicators were unclear among senior employees of the organisation. There was a lack of clarity amongst employees on future career growth within the company

Technology

Data was unavailable for projects executed prior to separation from the earlier partner. Data backup was not up to date in the servers and local machines. Also, the data was not consistent among the various teams.

Based on our assessment, we generated two alternative strategies for partner identification:

Strategy 1 : Start searching for a suitable partner immediately. However, this approach had lesser probability of deal closure due to current issues with the people, system and processes.

Strategy 2 : Working on prioritiseditems for three to six months under the CEO to resolve the issues identified, and then initiate the partner search process.

We met the shareholders and key management to discuss the status quo and next course of action.

Based on the agreement with the shareholders and key management, strategy 2 was undertaken. Under this, we supported the client in benchmarking key competitors against the client’s status quo. It included market research, interviewing key competitors, industry experts, customers, etc.

On the basis of the above internal and external assessment, we supported the client in following areas:

Recruit an on-board a full time CEO

We supported our client in identifying key resources in the industry to fit the CEO’s position

Strengthen structural design, engineering and safety

We supported them in setting up an internal team to fix norms/guidelines as per the industry standards

Identifying source of competitive advantage

We assisted them in preparing the board paper

Set processes for establishing linkages and traceability of drawings

We assisted the company in finalising their working manual

Nexdigm conducted an as-is analysis of the client’s current Processes, People and Technology. On the basis of our assessment and market research, two alternate growth strategies were formed and discussed with the stakeholders.

We helped the company build a strong foundation for future growth by improving existing processes, imparting skills to existing resources through training and knowledge sharing platforms and helping fill in the key position available in the company. We also identified strategic focus sectors and services besides assisting in formulating a policy on outsourcing.