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.
We use AI to accelerate our consulting engagements and improve the depths of insights and quality of outputs. We feed the AI with our best practices, lessons learned, frameworks and methodologies to get better results. We never feed proprietory information of our clients and partners into AI, as well as no personal data. We are aware that the results would be better if we would do it, but we make this trade-off, except our customers or partners explicitly allow us to do so.
Our trusted advisory model is:
- value-oriented
- vendor-neutral
- standards-based
- strategy-focused
- architecture-led
- AI-supported
- sustainability-inspired
We focus on specific topics, but are able to deliver holistic consulting and implementation engagements through our broad value network.
Sustainable Suppy Chains
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.
Enterprise Performance Improvement
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.
Due Diligence Services
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. While standard assessment models for software architecture, like ATAM, exist, in the areas of enterprise, domain and solution architecture, our assessments are based on the combined project expertise of our associates in different industries, geographies, business functions and technology landscapes.
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. Besides looking at the Digital Twin Consortium for guidance, we also collaborate with the Industrial Digital Twin Association.
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. Here we are actively engaged in the Manufacturing-X ecosystem and especially with Catena-X.
Digital Product Passports
Digital Product Passports (DPPs) 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.
Besides, DPPs will become mandatory for many product categories manufactured or imported in the EU, based on the ESPR regulation.
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. Our sister organisation INOVIA Solutions has a platform offering on this topic.