Based on client and peer feedback, QR_ again features on the Forbes 'World's Best Management Consulting Firms' list for the second consecutive year. Here’s our take on how we can mix it with the heavy hitters of professional services and in many cases come out on top.
1. We are doers and improvers who prioritise action over action lists; outcome over output.
Rather than being a pure consultancy, QR_ combines strategic insight through business improvement consulting with hands-on operational implementation via PDM analysts and SMEs supported by digital tools from our in-house ‘Special Projects’ development team, and a panel of internal and external advisors available to every client.
With our focus on engineered products, portfolios and supply chains, our consultants, analysts and developers can be domain experts familiar with stakeholder workflows and clients' enterprise architecture. We can get to work faster, less obtrusively and still deliver pertinent outcomes.
This combination of insight combined with the means and tools to accelerate and de-risk projects and programmes is well captured by our involvement in developing a new 3.5t ambulance from concept to launch within 12 months, and upping on-time part availability for prototype builds from 75 to 95 percent to support a $21m reduction in average prototype material spend.
2. We target the cause, not the symptoms; data is absolutely the right place to focus.
QR_ have moved beyond our early focus on product data management, but the foundational impact of data quality and ability to provide decision-driving reports to the right people at the right time remains. Data is an organisation’s lifeblood, and a key aim should be transforming this information into knowledge.
Previous benchmarking for QRonos, our BTRS tool, revealed as little as 14 percent of a part’s development time is tracked, meaning early issues and slippage only become visible as production approaches, resulting in a ‘hockey stick’ release curve necessitating expensive remedial actions such a tooling changes, emergency logistics or underutilisation of engineering teams waiting for blocked components to catch up. Time spent on data quality early in a project delivers significantly improves engineering output throughout a programme, while also reducing the risk of burnout and disgruntlement among client engineering teams.
3. We set you up for sustainable success, not continued dependence.
Ensuring momentum is not only gained, but maintained and embedded by scalable enterprise infrastructure and delivery-focused processes, QR_ sets clients up for long-term success and sustainable growth, not continued dependence on expensive external resource.
Clients have consistently praised our delivery of programme-specific and whole-business changing results that build upon existing systems and process frameworks, rather than relying on ground-up transformation projects that are often unwieldly, unpopular, and expensive and indifferently effective. Long development cycles make for short memories, and this approach to building capability facilitates the repeated leveraging of hard-won successes across multiple programmes and avoid reinventing the wheel. Read here how QR_ established right-sized PLM and NPD processes for a start-up vehicle manufacturer.
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Thank you to all our team, clients and partners for making 2023 everything it has been. Keep an eye on us in 2024 for some interesting developments!
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A note on QR_’s solutions:
QR_ partners with clients to build capability, accelerate programmes and improve engineering efficiency.
These outcome-driven solutions release the full value of people, process, systems and data, enabling clients to get products and technology to market faster and more efficiently.
Read 'Why PDM Matters' here, and how PDM can underpin a data-driven path to better new product development (NDP).