I've seen a number of posts around the internet that question the value of management consultants and really beg the question of in what situations can consultants add value better than managers within a company. Rather than answer that broad question, I thought that I would take an opportunity to illustrate an area where I have seen a lot of clients get value and where they would have struggled to structure the analysis given the resources they had available. The gap area is quantitative analysis.

Such a gap is often related to organizational structure. Companies often organize themselves to produce products and services efficiently. One company may be organized to produce PCs at the lowest cost while another may provide construction services with high customer satisfaction rates. Such companies may not always be optimized for solving specific problems related to entering new lines of business, making strategic shifts, etc. Additionally, in many companies there is a limited number of either finance people, financially-trained managers in non-financial roles, project-based financial analysts, database analysts, or statistics specialists. And in cases where such skilled people are more numerous, often they are either unavailable or essentially unavailable to focus on solving specific problems raised by the business.

Management consulting firms often have a lot of financial and numerically-trained people - it would not be unusual for every consultant assigned to a project to have in-depth quantitative skills. At risk of sounding like I am drinking my own Kool Aid, some gap-plugging and value-add consulting exampes I have seen include:

• providing not only an qualitative assessment of offering a new set of telecom services but also a quantitative assessment of how much shareholder value is built by offering the services (e.g., NPV analysis) and a quantitative rank ordering of cost areas that affect each service (e.g., NPV waterfall analysis)
• constructing a business plan to enter a new market and also providing full financial statement benchmarking against publically available financial statements of existing pure players and multiplayers within the industry to shed light on the business economics required to succeed (or fail) in the current world
• providing both a qualitative assessment of why backoffice clearinghouse started to slip on their service level agreements with customers and a quantitative analysis of how more than 70% of the problem statistically had to do with Little's Law in operations where increases in inventory mapped directly into average cycle time (and then showing how the components of operations throughput failed and could be made more fault-tolerant for the future)
• providing a operations process flow for renegotiating commercial real estate properties and also a per property financial analysis template coupled to a real estate database to identify the most important negotiating parameters and the money at stake for each parameter.

So I guess my observation would be that the areas of financial and numerical analysis are commonly recurring patterns where consultants provide value-add (or at least polish and high-touch) to solving client problems. Often the quantitative analysis goes even one step further, e.g., to help the client build committment and resolve to either enter the new business, take on the development project, or move on to something else with no regrets.