Throughout the past 25 years, AArete has identified cost reduction opportunities and implemented strategies to address these pain points wherever they have occurred within diversified industrial companies: inventory, overhead, logistics, distribution, payroll or elsewhere. Today, we will take this same total-cost approach to helping your company eliminate or significantly reduce these costs. This approach is thorough and comprehensive. It starts with ideation and encompasses everything through to implementation – and occasionally beyond. From our history of strategic cost reduction, we have gained an unprecedented cross-industry experience with unique know-how, knowledge and benchmarking expertise that we will apply to your company and its specific cost reduction efforts, regardless of industry. We also will bring the best-in-class practices to your company, whether they arose in your industry or in one far afield. Furthermore, from having conducted dozens of similar projects over the years, we guarantee a minimum ROI on your investment with AArete.

We bring an unprecedented data analytics capability to your cost-reduction project. Our Center of Data Excellence (CODE) team of analysts and data scientists will analyse your current spend and then join our subject matter experts in generating singular insights that enable us to define cost savings hidden beyond the low-hanging fruit. As you would expect, we use traditional analytics where appropriate. But, going further, we couple this standard approach with advanced data modelling (including predictive modelling) and an ability to handle huge volumes of data securely.

Many diversified industrial companies are unable to deliver their products cost efficiently. As a result, they are unable to stay afloat among the constantly shifting industry and market changes. To overcome these disruptions and to maximise results, you need a robust, dynamic, supply chain – one with a low operating cost that stems from improved, streamlined processes. AArete can help.

Our expertise in optimising people, processes and technologies across industries and verticals enables us to assess and improve your entire supply chain cost structure – from design and engineering to procurement, operations, manufacturing and logistics. Working with your team, we first gain a thorough understanding of the supply chain function within your organisation. We also conduct a current-state assessment of your supply chain’s pain points to identify those that need to be addressed quickly. Then, we recommend and implement a strategic plan for developing a streamlined, low-cost supply chain that improves your bottom line and increases your ability to outperform your competitors.

Data and analytics play an integral role in this work we do to improve your supply chain. We apply them to understand your current operations and to establish a lean supply chain with improved efficiencies that will help ensure your competitive positioning today and in the future. We also use them to create and implement measurable metrics specifically important to your organisation and to develop a meaningful management-level dashboard that shows your continuous efforts over the years to address these metrics.

Besides our highly skilled professional consultants, AArete brings a robust team of data scientists, data engineers and technology experts to your project. Members of this team at our Center of Data Excellence (CODE) have advanced analytics capabilities and expertise in the latest programming tools, including Python, R, SAS, STATA and SQL. They use these tools and others to develop not only standard analytics models but advanced models, such as predictive modelling, AI, machine learning and robotics. They analyse your problem and recommend the best solution. If, for example, that solution is robotic process automation, they develop a bot that converts a repeating, time-consuming, manual activity into an automated process that is faster, more accurate and cost-effective, enabling you to deploy your human resources to more important tasks.

In addition, our CODE members’ ability to work with extremely large sets of data and their deep knowledge of specific industries and project types enable them to efficiently identify opportunities for cost savings and improvements within your organisation.

Together these data experts and our consultants offer an unmatched ability to solve complex problems effectively. We go deeper to understand more about your specific issues than our competitors can ever know. And we quickly identify opportunities that they may not find for months, if at all. When we complete your project, we do not just walk away. Our data-driven solutions are repeatable. We leave them behind so you can effectively measure and track your ongoing efforts to achieve (or exceed) the primary goals we helped you establish.

Occasionally, every company has an executive who needs time away from the job or decides to move on to another organisation. When you face this situation and need to fill a key position on an interim basis, you can turn to AArete for help.

Our professionals are flexible and agile. We can call on them to fill a suddenly vacant C-level or VP position in your organisation because they have the functional knowledge and industry experience to manage the position effectively until you recruit a full-time replacement. Over the years, our consultants have served in interim roles throughout management – accounting, finance, operations, technology and elsewhere – at many organisations across industries. In healthcare, for example, we have successfully filled interim roles from our network of subject matter experts, including those who previously led Medicaid programmes and ran hospitals. Whatever your industry or specific requirements, we have professionals with the expertise, functional skills and leadership experience you need.

Besides filling positions when executives take time off or leave a company, we also place consultants in interim roles to oversee the completion of Project Management Office (PMO) projects. AArete will assign a project leader (or a team, if needed) to lead your PMO effort whenever your internal resources lack the skills to ensure the project’s success. We have trained and certified project leaders with the subject matter expertise, specialised skill set and intellectual capital to manage your project effectively from ideation through completion, ensuring the time and budget constraints are met and the guidelines and goals are completed as designed.

AArete applies a detailed methodology to every merger integration project – and tailors it for each company, including yours. This methodology drives our pre-merger steps to ensure compliances and to identify the merger’s potential synergies and their benefits. It also directs our post-merger efforts to synthesise all key disciplines of your company and the target organisation to reduce redundancy, complexity and the cost of the newly formed enterprise.

On the pre-merger side of the transaction, we help you identify a potential target for your company by either finding the target ourselves or determining that the company already chosen by your strategy team can be effectively integrated into your organisation. Once the target has been selected, we conduct a White Room, independent review of both companies’ capabilities, operations and contracts to identify all potential synergies available from the merger. We evaluate and value the merger’s potential opportunities to complement your organisation by delivering value-add in both the near- and long-term. And we draw on the data analytics capabilities of our Center of Data Excellence (CODE) data scientists, data engineers and technology experts and on the market intelligence of our consultants to support and validate your due diligence on the potential merger.

After the merger, we ensure that the synergies identified during the pre-merger come to fruition as quickly as possible. We help you maintain urgency and priority around these synergies, preventing the delay or loss of any one of them, while enhancing your ability to maximise the benefits of each. We help seamlessly fuse the people, processes and technologies of both companies, and make certain that any inefficiencies are addressed and resolved quickly.

The best way forward, AArete can help you set the right course and start your company’s transformation. This transformation will not be easy, though. It will involve organisation and people changes, new financial modelling, operational improvements, new, better technology and data analyses, and more. It will touch every aspect of the organisation and alter every function – some more intensely than others.

Over the years, AArete has helped companies in your industry make needed transformations; so, we know the ins and outs of the industry. We also bring an array of skills to your transformation to ensure it will be successful. First among them is our ability to understand each function within your company and to unite them in an unprecedented level of cross-function collaboration to do what is best for the company. Second is our ability to manage change – that unavoidable, frightening concept involved in every transformation.

AArete will handle your transformation from ideation through to implementation, customising our approach to your company’s current state and the competitive levers you need to pull to achieve your transformation goal. We will start by interpreting signals from the marketplace and leveraging your data to thoroughly assess the company’s current state – identifying gaps, weaknesses and problems. Next, we will help you determine your outcome goal and the strategic moves needed to arrive there at the end of the transformation. Then, we will implement sustainable solutions to ensure you get there. And we will, as always, guarantee a minimum ROI on your investment with AArete.