McKinsey: Operations salaries same as strategy salaries?

The municipal utility Hamburg Energized is a local energy retail (power and gas) and distribution grid company active in the city of Hamburg. The majority of shares of Hamburg Energized is held by the city itself. As the distribution system operator of Hamburg, Hamburg Energized is responsible for the operations and maintenance of the gas and electricity grid on customer level.

In the course of the energy transition in Germany, the responsible board member for the technical grid operations, Jan Bremer, thinks about deploying Smart Meters in the gas and electricity grid. He approaches you with the request to conduct a feasibility analysis and to give a clear recommendation whether or not Hamburg Energized should use Smart Meters in its gas and electricity grid in the future.

TKMC was mandated to advise the company Automotive Assembly (AA) which is in the automotive business and assembles axles for sports cars. The company has - as a Tier1 supplier - several locations worldwide, always near the OEM’s production plant for just in sequence delivery of the axles. The business model of AA is to assemble the components and pieces of the Tier-N suppliers to build a fully functional axle, quality check them, transport them to the plant of the OEM and prepare the axles to be directly built into the car on the production line. The axle has to be fully functional including damper, springs, brakes and all the necessary electronics. The administrative work for billing and paying is done centrally over all plants in the headquarters by a special department.

• Tell me of a situation where you had an opinion and no one seemed to agree with you.
• What was your goal when you decided to join university / work / clubs / a sports team?
• Did you have a goal that you were not able to reach? What did you do?
• What do you want to be remembered for and how are you achieving it?
• What is your typical way of dealing with conflict?

Our client, GamingHub, is a large diversified entertainment corporation that received a request to approve a $200 m capital allocation from its video game manufacturing division. The division wants to triple the capacity.

The client hired us to help him decide if he should approve this capital request and have asked you what critical issues are to be looked into to decide if the division's market is attractive enough to expand.

As a B2B firm we manufacture test equipment for electronics firms. The revenue per product ranges from $500 to $100,000 as this is a high complexity business.

On an average we hold 200 days of inventory which we would like to bring down to 100. What do you think we should do?