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Inverto Case: VacuLuxe Innovations' Supply Chain Makeover
The client, VacuLuxe Innovations, is a manufacturer for vacuum pumps, e.g. rotary vane pumps, cryogenic pumps located in Germany. The company has grown from a start-up to a major corporation over the last 50 years. However, after benchmarking the economics of their business, the client discovered that their direct spend (i.e., COGS supplier spend) represented a higher percentage of their revenue than their closest competitors.The client's top management has engaged the SCM and procurement specialized consultancy Inverto to advise the company in this critical situation.An initial meeting with the CPO of VacuLuxe Innovations will be conducted tomorrow. VacuLuxe Innovations aims to discuss optimization potentials in the current collaboration with suppliers as well as levers to improve the supply chain resilience & carbon footprint. Unfortunately, VacuLuxe Innovations has only submitted the following high level data for their direct spend yet.
Inverto Case: Fast Dish Restaurant
Fast Dish, a publicly traded Quick Service Restaurant (Franchise) company with over €20 billion in revenue and more than 20.000 restaurants globally, has recently faced major challenges with regards to supply chain management and sustainability.The client's top management has engaged the SCM and procurement specialized consultancy Inverto to advise the company in this critical situation.
Overseas Market Growth - 1st Round BCG Type
The client is an Indonesian producer of paper boards which can be further processed into paper boxes, shopping bags, etc. They sell in both their domestic market i.e. Indonesia, and in the export market i.e. the US. Revenue last year was $5 billion, with 80% from Indonesia and 20% from the US. Overall they have been growing at 3% annually. The client wants to achieve a 5% growth rate in the next 1-2 years. With the resource constraint they have, they want to focus on one of the two markets. They want to know which market they should go after to achieve that increase in growth rate, and how.
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Smart Meters
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.
Make Steakhouse Great Again!
Your client is a Franchisee of a popular Steakhouse-chain in Germany. The Franchisee currently owns 2 Steakhouse-restaurants and wants you to investigate how well these perform and if there is any way for improvement?
Bodybuilding Made Easy
Your client is a newly founded protein company. Its owners are two brothers. One of them is a chemist and the other one is a very famous fitness model and personal trainer on YouTube. They intend to enter the nutrition supplements industry where they want to focus on protein supplementation for bodybuilding. The chemist has the capabilities to produce protein products for this industry. He has used this knowledge and a substantial loan to build a factory in Germany that would allow the brothers to mass produce their protein products.The brothers have approached you to advise them on how they can use their capabilities to profitably sell their product using their factory in Germany. They request very practical advice on how to get their product from their factory into the hands of the consumer at a profit.
From online to offline
We are thinking of establishing a door-to-door distribution of an existing online newspaper in Kolkata, India. We haven't spent much time on how the process would work in practice yet. Can you help us evaluate the feasibility of the plan?
Premium Brand Apparel Retailer
We are a premium brand apparel retailer facing a consistent decrease in market share. We would like you to figure out why this is happening and provide recommendations to reverse this trend.
Canada Bus Operator
We are a Canada bus transport service operating between major cities. We have been losing money for the past 5 years. Our new CEO thinks that we need to aggressively cut costs in order to return to profitability. We also suspect the over-operated routes as well as the new routes to be the cause of the loss. How do you suggest we should face this problem?
Superfix
Our client, Superfix, is a mid-size chain of auto-service garages that has been doing well for the past ten years with 30 stores. However, since management felt that the business was saturating, they expanded with an additional 15 stores in other geographical areas. However, the expansion came with negative effects and falling profits. You're hired to figure out why the company is losing profit despite its 15-branch growth over the past few years.
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Spain Shipping
Our client is a local shipping firm in Spain where they handle local shipping of packages delivered by international shipping firms like FedEx, UPS & DHL. These firms deliver packages to the key city hubs and then our client takes it from there.They want to know how many trucks they should lease to support their operations. From a cost-savings perspective they can only lease one model-type and we need to find out how many trucks the start-up needs.
Hospital's ill finances
A firm managing hospitals has recently been experiencing growing pains. It has contacted our firm to ask for help.
Electric Mobility
Our client is a start-up company that wants to mass-produce an electric vehicle for the US market.So far it has developed a prototype all-electric vehicle.They hired us to solve the problem of swapping to mass-production.
ACR Medical Lab
Your client, ACR, is a chain of medical laboratories. They provide patients with MRI and CT scans as well as other major tests.They have expensive testing equipment in their inventory and run about 250 labs. Usually doctors refer their patients to one of the labs.Because ACR is worried about a decrease in profits, they have hired us to evaluate the market.
ChemInt
Your client, ChemInt, is a global chemicals company that manufactures Ponsulene in some locations around the world.It has several joint ventures (JV) in Asian markets and in total 5 plants in China, Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan, all of which serve the local markets as well as neighboring markets including China.Due to the strong demand for Ponsulene and profitable margins in China, a number of new Chinese players are entering the market in China as well as in the neighboring countries. ChemInt has called in your company to estimate the influences on their business by these happenings.
Bus maintenance
Your client, BusCo, is a passenger bus company in Uganda, Africa. Due to the poor road conditions, maintenance plays a very important role in the reliability and quality of BusCo’s services.BusCo outsourced all of its bus maintenance operations to MaintainCo in the last years. However, especially last year, BusCo was very disappointed with the maintenance provided. The bad service caused delays in service as well as trip cancellations.Now BusCo is considering doing its maintenance in-house. However, an investment amortization period of 4 years or less is required.The CEO wants to know from you if they should pursue the in-house maintenance strategy next year?
Spirits distribution
Our client, Ooze, is one of the market leaders in the US spirits market (strong alcohol products).They are thinking of restructuring their distribution strategy and want to know whether they should invest in 1 or 5 distribution centers.What would you recommend?
Disguise distribution
Your client is a German manufacturer of disguises for events and parties called KostümCo. They segment their products in two lines: round-the-year and seasonal products.Round-the-year products serve customers that celebrate birthdays and common parties during the whole year.Seasonal products aim at special occasions like the carnival or the beer festival in Munich and are only sold for some time before these events.KostümCo makes the design, manufacturing and resells the disguises to retailers in 5 different German cities.Recently, though, the largest retail customer complained that KostümCo’s prices are too high. After some internal analyses, the client found this to be due mainly to distribution costs. You have been asked to figure out how we can reduce distribution costs.
FibOp fibers
The new CEO of an optical fiber manufacturer, called FibOp, has come to you complaining that their revenues went down by 40% this year compared to last year.He wants you to help him figure out what they need to do in order to achieve the previous year’s revenues again.
Pharma R&D
Your client is a pharmaceutical company which is worried about the portfolio optimization of their R&D projects.They hired us to investigate it and help them make the most return of their R&D investments in the short and mid-term (without totally forgetting the long-term horizon).How would you go about it and what would you recommend the client to do?
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