Value-First Consulting

We help organizations with our experience, expertise and co-innovation network to ensure they achieve value from their investments in digital technologies and business models.
Value for us is broader than just cost savings, revenue increase and profits. It also includes customer and employee satisfaction, environmental and social impact, as well as making the planet a better place to live for future generations.

We believe that the usage of technical standards and engagement in digital eco-systems will accelerate the development of solutions as well as improve their quality. Hence we are active in standard organization associations like Catena-X, Industrial Digital Twin Consortium, Institute of Asset Management, Manufacturing-X, Digital Twin Consortium and others. You can find our Value Network here.

We are one of the first Catena-X Qualified Advisory Providers globally and this expertise is also relevant in other X-Initiatives, like Semiconductor-X, Chem-X or Energy Data-X

We focus on specific topics, but are able to deliver holistic consulting and implementation engagements through our broad value network.

Supply Chain Transparency
Supply Chain Transparency is not only required from a compliance perspective, but also a necessary step to improve Supply Chain performance and resilience.

Supply Chain Resilience
Supply Chain Resilience is required to mitigate the risk of disruption in the supply as well as react fast to supply chain disruptions.

Circular Supply Chains
Circular Supply Chains are needed to improve the sustainability performance of an organization. This includes eco-design for products, using recycled raw material, as well es 4Rs at the end of a product life cycle.

Operational Performance
Operational Performance is important in all parts of an organization and has business processes as a focus for optimization. The book „Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution“ from Hammer and Champy is at the base of what we do, but of course the possibilities of digital technologies to optimize business processes is our focus.

ESG Performance
Regulations, investor focus and creating a competitive advantage through business value that is focused on financial and economics is at the core of ESG Performance. Initiatives like the Science Based Targets Initiative require organizations to define business value differently and introduce new KPI to measure success around their sustainability transformation. This is what we mean, when we talk about ESG Performance.

Business Model Innovation
A classic, but with a focus on how digital technologies can transform Business Models. When we talk about business models, we think about the Business Model Canvas of Osterwalder.

Industry 4.0 Assessment

Industry 4.0 is a broad spectrum of business and technology topics, but its core is how digital technologies can improve industrial organizations. The organization Plattform Industrie 4.0 has start many initiatives over the years with a focus to shape industry-driven standards that are then handed over to national, regional or International Standard Development Organizations, like ISO.

Architecture Assessment

Architecture for us contains business and technology architecture. Both change over time and often do no longer support the strategic business and digital goals of an organization. Our assessment can look at both, business and technology operating model and compare it to industry best practices and emerging technologies and digital business models.

Digital Solution Assessment

Sometimes an organization encounters problems with a specific solution or wants to check if it is still fit-for-purpose. This includes technical due diligence needs by a VC or PE firm. We use existing reference architecture, like the Industrial Internet Security Framework, Digital Twin Capability Periodic Table or Catena-X to benchmark a solution against industry best practices.

Industry 4.0 Strategy & Architecture
Industry 4.0 was, and still is, created through a portfolio of initiatives, including Catena-X, that have the goal to make asset-intensive industries more sustainable and resilient, as well as improve the quality of products and processes. This is achieve through standards, blueprints and best practices, defined by a pre-commercial industry ecosystem that is led by technology user organization and invested jointly into improvements in global supply chains.

Digital Twins
Digital Twins provide a holistic view on assets, products and processes and besides creating transparency into operations also enable process optimization and business model innovation.

Data Spaces
Data Spaces provide a secure and standard-based data exchange solution where you remain in control of your data, while significantly reducing your integration efforts with customers, partners and suppliers.

Digital Product Passports
Digital Product Passports provide a standardized data structure for product and material data exchange in a global supply chain. It reduces your efforts to map different data structures between you and your customers, partners and suppliers and keep those mapping up-to-data. Through the standard data structures, it is also easier for AI solutions to consume the data, without a lot of data wrangling.

Solution Development Life Cycle Optimization
Despite improvement through new approaches like Agile, DevOps and low-code/no-code there is still potential to reduce the overall development time, lower the cost and improve the quality of digital solutions. The impact is a better ROI, improved acceptance with users, customer and partners, as well as the achievement of business benefits earlier, as the solution can go live earlier. Research shows that a model-driven approach to solution development using reference models, standards and genAI tools can further improve the SDLC.