BREAKTHROUGH MANAGEMENT GROUP INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED(BMGI)
As organizations evolve and to meet the rapidly changing external environments, even the best companies seek external guidance to assist them to improve their performance and for specialized skills. There are some consultancies which put their skin into ensuring the success of the organizations, and helping them to carve a niche in their respective areas. BMGI is one such top-notch Management Consulting firm that helps the companies to expand their dimensions in the business world through world-class support and services. With a strong geographic presence, and the offices in India, the USA, Europe, Africa and several countries in Asia, they provide to clients-seamless integrated services across the globe. Their primary purpose is to help businesses improve their competitiveness in local and global markets through better efficiencies and effectiveness of current operations, deploying strategies for growth and fostering a culture of innovation.
BMGI provides its solutions under 4 service lines: Innovation, Strategy, Problem Solving and Business Transformation.
Under Innovation, they follow a structured methodology called D4 – Define, Discover, Develop, and Demonstrate. To enable innovation to be applied on a day to day basis, by innovation practioners, BMGI’s book ‘The Innovator’s Toolkit’ serves as a handy guide.
They have assisted firms across various sectors such as oil and gas, electronics, FMCG, auto, pharma and chemical industries, Banking and Financial services in using innovative techniques to assist them in designing and implementing innovative business ideas, products or processes.
Under the strategy practice, they assist firms by jointly developing their strategy and more importantly ‘implementing the strategy.’ Their recommended approach for strategy implementation is using the Balanced Scorecard model. They also deploy the “Hoshin Kanri” method of policy and strategy deployment, based on organizations which prefer the Japanese approach to strategy deployment. Recently, they have assisted food major and a top tier 1 auto player in deploying the Hoshin Kanri methodology, thereby enabling them in taking the vision and strategy down to the grass-root level for effective execution.
The third major service they offer is that of performance excellence under the problem-solving practice. They would have worked with at least 2 -3 firms from the top 10 players in any given industry. Their typical results include delivery of 1-3% of the revenues in profits or helping organizations ramp-up growth significantly > 2X in 5 years timeframe. Some of the specific improvement areas across different functions include deciding what markets to serve, what products to offer, designing products, improving sales effectiveness, pricing, and market penetration, improving overall supply chain productivity, reducing inventories, reducing purchase costs and significant improvement in quality and reliability of products and processes (both core and support). They usually take on challenging problems that stretch the envelope and apply rigorous problem-solving techniques such as Lean and Six Sigma methodologies.
To enable problem-solving to be applied on a day to day basis, by Lean Six Sigma practitioners, who deal with complex problems, BMGI’s books ‘Lean Six Sigma’ and ‘A Team Leader’s Guide for Lean Kaizen Events’ serve as enablers. For R&D professionals seeking robust design methodologies and first time right product designs, BMGI’s “Design for Six Sigma” serves as a reference.
The last service they offer is business transformation. Under this, they offer services to businesses, which want to get into altogether new business lines or smaller firms/start-ups that are looking at radical business models/inorganic growth. They assist such firms with their business plans, organizing resources and monitoring and supporting their transformation plan. They are assisting a major investment partner, who is incubating and encouraging several startups, which are using technology as their core.
BMGI India is located in Mumbai. The clientele entails leading Fortune 1000 Global companies and other Indian companies from diverse industries such as financial services, IT/ITES, airlines, chemicals, FMCG, discrete manufacturing, telecommunications, petrochemical, textiles, healthcare & energy. Some of our global clients include Hitachi, Siemens, Philips, Unilever, DeBeers, Avis Budget Group, TNT Express, General Dynamics to name a few. Some of the Indian clients we have served include Asian Paints, Apollo Tyres, Aditya Birla Group, HDFC, Standard Chartered Bank, JP Morgan, Max New York Life, ITC, Volkswagen, Aditya Birla Group, Piramal Group, John Deere, Daimler Benz, Vodafone, and Reliance Group amongst others.
BMGI has been operating in India for the last 26 years, and their central focus has been relentless to create value for their clients. Over the years, new services have got added, the methodologies that have been deployed have got sharper to provide the necessary focus, growth-related methodologies around Innovation, have helped companies buckle the recessionary challenges in the external market place.
BMGI has been at the forefront of innovating in the industry that they operate in. In the early 2000s, they were one of the first global companies to develop and deploy eLearning for the converted Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification. Their eLearning platform inspired several others to take the work of developing content online. A decade later, BMGI became the first consulting company to offer the content virtually free to individuals, and once again transformed the business model amongst their competitors.
INNOVATION IS THE NEED OF THE HOUR
Early in 2007, foreseeing the need to assist organizations from a growth perspective, BMGI developed and created a robust though flexible methodology called D4 (Define-Discover-Develop- Demonstrate) to help organizations drive organic growth through innovation. The D4 methodology today considered the benchmark method for deploying innovation and design thinking projects within organizations.
Seeing the strong linkage between strategy and innovation, they went ahead and built their own framework to help organizations define strategy. They see strategy more as a process, and hence believe that leaders in the organization need to invest time and effort for several months across the year to build their strategy.
Hence, over the period of the last two decades, they have constantly been evolving from helping organizations to solve problems in their current paradigms, to assisting them with strategic planning to ensure that they deliver their business objectives, to being able to create new products and services honing their innovation framework and working with them to define their long term strategies to build a sustainable organization.
As the market continues to evolve with IoT, big data, machine learning and AI, BMGI is also expanding its services to integrate these in its solution set with their clients. Once again their work is differentiating, they work with clients to better understand the value drivers and then with some of the best partners in the business they work to drive implementation of processes using big data and tools such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation).
WHAT MAKES THEM DIFFERENT?
The factors which clearly differentiate BMGI from other management consulting firms are two: using robust methodologies while working with clients on some of their most difficult problems and their hands-on do-with approach to consulting. BMGI prides itself on working shoulder to shoulder with clients in delivering the solution and does not produce a great number of reports and recommendations.
Typically the interventions will result in at least a 3:1 return to their clients’ business, and hence they enjoy a very high client satisfaction (Over 98%) and an over 90% referral business.
In India, they have a team of highly experienced consultants who have diverse backgrounds and an average of 12 years of experience.
VALUES AND ETHICS
After a multitude of deliberations, BMGI creates essential company values. One of them reads as “DO what is right for the customer.” This is different from the statement that ‘the customer is always right’, which is obviously can’t be true all times. Very often it is our responsibility to show and demonstrate to customers the paradigms that they operate in may perhaps be less relevant, or to caution them on some of their thinking that is leading to ineffectiveness. At times, these are contrary to what the leadership wants to hear. They have not hesitated in doing right and this has held them in good stead. They have a very high customer satisfaction rate and referral rate (amongst the best in the industry) and also delivered in excess of their commitments. Naresh says, “Another value that we seek to define us is that we tell our consulting staff to “Have fun at work and Treat Company as your own.” The process of their consulting is intense. Very often their consulting staff leads a high pressure, individual role at different levels at client organizations.” If our consultants don’t enjoy their work and feel that they have don’t the freedom to operate, then they will struggle to deliver their best and also unable to sustain themselves in the organization. Naresh N Shahani states, “In spite, we are a niche small consulting setup, we have a very high consultant retention rate too. Several of our consulting team have been with us for more than a decade”.
MILESTONES AND ACHIEVEMENTS
“Our success is based on our clients’ success.”~Naresh N Shahani
The best achievement is what their clients have achieved. There have been several occasions when BMGI has collaborated on working on some of the most difficult problems and delivered results in areas where the organization has struggled for several years. Some examples of customer successes include:
- Growth stories: They are assisting two firms, one in the auto segment and one in the food supplement business to double its revenues in 4 years timeframe. From deciding what products to supply, what channels to use, what operational lines to debottleneck and what new lines to setup, and then follow through with the design of the should-be organisation, they have hand-held at every step to implement their vision and fructify the results. The food supplement company grew by nearly 80% in 2 years timeframe. The auto firm has grown by nearly 30 % in the first year of the intervention itself and is likely to hit the overall growth of 60% from baseline this year.
- Profitability: One of the major Healthcare firms approached them for assessing one of their businesses and helping improve their profitability within 9 months. They spent about 3 months in doing a detailed diagnostic and came up with specific recommendations for change leading to improvement opportunities of nearly 5% of the revenues as bottom line, such as pricing, sales effectiveness, raw material pricing, optimizing the Capex spend and improving the Capex utilization, rationalizing and where feasible improving profitability from services and locations serviced. BMGI carried out a series of discussions and training workshops for the implementation of the ideas and within 3 months most of the ideas had been implemented.
- Achieving World-class quality: They are working with a major top 6 generics pharma firms and are attempting a world’s first. They have taken pilot molecules in API out of which 3 of the molecules have nearly hit six sigma performance levels (3.4 defects per million). Some of the impurity levels have fallen to practically zero indicating extremely high levels of reliability with sigma levels of Ten and beyond.
GIVING BACK TO SOCIETY
Over the years, most of BMGI’s work has been with large companies. The best way to give back has been to see how they can use their consulting work on social and small business projects. They have not hesitated to assist small/start-up organizations as they are struggling to take their ideas into a business model, or with social organizations such as Ashoka and working with their entrepreneurs in their journey to scale their businesses.
MESSAGE TO THE READERS
The Managing Director passes an illuminating message to the readers, where he motivates them, and says, “Businesses today are faced with increasing competition and shortening of product life cycles. It is therefore imperative for all companies to be ambidextrous – manage their current business effectively and create their future business. Many times these may appear to be conflicting. Business leaders will need to invest their resources wisely and make tough decisions. While there is always their experience and gut that helps them, today there are robust processes that can aid their decision-making processes. And companies that implement such robust processes for innovation, strategy and problem solving have a great chance of long term success.”
