Management Consulting
Management and Financial Consulting ideas
We are always excited by the chance to tackle unusual questions. Like these ones:
“What’s a fair producer price to pay farmers for my inputs?”
“How much should I be asking for my company’s shares?”
“Who is the best person to lead my company?”
“How can I get things out of my warehouse five times faster?”
“What are my customers’ biggest worries and how can I deal with them?”
“Can you really shorten our business process from 3 weeks to two days just by using technology and still do it better?”
“How can I cut my cost of borrowing by a big number – like 50%?”
“Exactly how did my money disappear? Who took it?”
Strategic Planning facilitation
Most people would agree that there is no substitute for strategic planning. To succeed, we must all work carefully through what we are offering, what others are offering, understand our relative strengths and weaknesses and design a line of attack that will produce the results we want. Our people have been involved in helping people pick out their strong and weak points, appraise competitiors and other factors and nail down a strategy that works. We work by helping our clients strip away the irrelevant information and looking for the most important drivers of success. We ask questions like: “How is it strategic?” Then we summarise these thoughts into a strategy guideline that your team can use to prepare detailed plans and get to work.
Management audit and business diagnostics
How well is your business working? How do you know? It’s a constant source of worry to business managers that they are losing money through loopholes that staff, suppliers, customers and competitors are able to exploit because they are aren’t efficient enough. This is easy in simple organisations. As their complexity grows however, it isn’t so clear where the bottlenecks are and people disagree about which ones are really signficant. It is also human nature to tend to prefer to do things the way they have always been done even if newer and better ways have been developed since the last time you adopted those procedures. Our people will go through each area of your organisation, asking if you are using various “best practice” ideas and asking why not, if not. Where there is room for improvement, we will outline the areas that you need to work on with our suggestions about the best way to make a start.
Business Process Re-engineering
As organisations grow, so does their tendency to evolve complex procedures to control flows – of cash, goods and service time. Over time, long chains of processes begin to weigh down and demoralise both customers and staff. Organisation members even develop ways to “beat the system” or to undermine the work of others simply by complying with all the required procedures slowly. This is often the beginning of a slow death for an organisation, particularly one where the competition is swift in responding. Business Process re-engineering consists of reexamining all the processes that deliver ultimate satisfaction and competitiveness to your customers. If necessary we work with you to eliminate redundant ones or redesign them to make you as responsive as possible.
Business support services
Large organisations that draw goods and services from smaller organisations frequently have to deal with the inflexibilities of the smaller entities. Management, financing, quality control, costing and pricing, meeting deadlines, timeliness – these are some of the things that make it difficult to do business with smaller entities. Yet sometimes it is unavoidable (for example if they are the source of your raw materials) or it is too inconvenient to start a search for a new supplier and form new relationships. Sometimes it is better to step in and help the partner organisation improve its game at relatively little (or no) cost to yourself and keep them as your partner. Kawai can work directly with partner organisations on a range of solutions specific to each one. We can also design solutions that work across the board to enable you to negotiate better prices, impose common quality standards, track market performance, monitor competitor trends, provide training and generally improve your partner’s quality and reliability.
Forensic investigations
Unfortunately in the life of some organisations, there are major fraud or similar events that can severely impact the credibility or the operations of the organisation. Because of their very nature, these are crimes and therefore hidden. We can carry out intensive and far-ranging forensic investigations that go far beyond the evidence contained in the entitiy’s books and records. Our staff have been involved in very sensitive investigations involving hundreds of millions of shillings. We are able to carry out highly confidential and effective investigations resulting in thorough reports and effective legal action.
