Q: What are your company’s major goals over the next 5 years? (quantitative and/or qualitative)
A: We’re a lean operational consulting firm and we’re continuing to look at how our clients can use technology and advanced analytics to think differently about their business. Technology-related revenue is going to become more and more important over the next several years. We aim for year-on-year growth by acquiring new clients and by sustaining and growing our existing client relationships.
Q: Do you work with other technology partners?
A: Yes, we partner with a handful of technology vendors that complement our professional services suite. We use enabling technologies for inventory optimization, network optimization, and transactional supply chain planning. We decided to add River Logic to our technology suite in order to provide a robust modeling capability to our clients to address a variety of different business issues and because of the outstanding partner program.
Q: What are some of the challenges your customers (and prospects) are facing that led you to search for a prescriptive analytics solution?
A: Many of our clients are thinking about how to adopt advanced analytics technologies and how to use them to drive business performance and process improvement. Having the ability to model a business so that it links relationships between business units and understands financial metrics is huge. Many technology solutions allow you to model operational data but they don’t convert the data into financial metrics. River Logic’s ability to blend operations and financial data is very powerful. With regards to Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), most tools today can’t tell you the operational impact that overtime, moving volume, etc., will have on your financial metrics. If our customers really want to think about speed and streamlining their business, they need to be able to model changes and improvements before they make decisions. This helps them to understand if they’re making the right moves. River Logic gives us that ability, and that’s highly valuable in the S&OP process. Today, many companies make S&OP-related decisions without really seeing the impact of those decisions! We also plan on potentially focusing on some inventory optimization problems, product portfolio decisions, network decisions, transportation modeling, sourcing decisions, and as many other operational challenges that can be better informed using modeling capabilities. Partnering with River Logic is so powerful to our client base because it also gives us a mechanism to consult once they have their models built out — we can help them determine which plan they should execute and help them understand what questions to ask.
Q: What made you confident in selecting River Logic?
A: River Logic has developed an outstanding partnership model. The model is mutually beneficial — something we don’t see very often. Also, the personality, culture, and approach of the team is big for us.
Q: Are you creating any new roles specifically around River Logic?
A: We’ve started the process of selecting business analysts that will help us build models for clients, but we’re still early in the game with River Logic.
Q: How will Prescriptive Analytics/River Logic help you expand into different industries/marketspaces? How will it help your company meet its strategic goals?
A: Having River Logic’s modeling capability will help open doors for those clients and prospects needing a robust solution for modeling. We need a technology that really understands business problems. From a supply chain perspective, the ability to do this type of analytical work is quite frankly required in order to do any sort of analytics around a company’s business. So, River Logic is really going to help separate us from some of our competition. We will be able to combine their advanced analytics and our ability to implement decisions using insights from River Logic’s prescriptive analytics capabilities. There’s a wave of people going to all the different forms of analytics, going through all of this data, but many of them are still missing “how do you convert that to actionable insights and execute on them?”. With River Logic in our technology stack, we will have the ability to address that question.
Q: How is your company uniquely qualified to deliver PRESCRIPTIVE ANALYTICS/RIVER LOGIC to the markets you’re going after?
A: Actionable insights — TBM is known as a firm that can quickly implement and drive business benefit. We believe that the powerful combination of insights and the ability to do something with those insights is a real game-changer. We have the ability to help our clients with process rigor and technologies that help them see when things are off course, understand the reasons for failure, and to plan and execute the corrective actions to get things back on track faster.
We also have a proprietary web-based technology called Dploy Solutions, that drives discipline for effective execution and accelerates results realization.
This “three-legged stool” is the differentiator:
- River Logic for modeling, analytics, and scenario exploration helps to identify the best path to change/implementation.
- Our consulting approach helps to convert that information into meaningful action plans.
- Dploy Solutions is our web-based technology for improving execution for tracking, monitoring, and improving performance.
To read the full press release announcement about the partnership, click here.
