It hasn’t gotten easier for companies to answer the essential questions: What shall we make (or buy)? Where shall we make it—and how? But economic uncertainty, trade volatility, and emerging technologies have made it critical for companies to find the right answers.
New technologies have upended industrial production. As a result, smart manufacturers are turning toward factories of the future. But they must address critical challenges about just which manufacturing technologies, structures, and processes to embrace.
BCG helps our clients make the decisions that shape countless conditions: your environmental footprint and sustainability, your cost profile, your exposure to risks, your workforce requirements, your customer targeting, and your ultimate profitability.
BCG’s manufacturing consulting focuses our clients on three essential and guiding questions.
Your product, product lines, and underlying components establish your strategic direction. What will you make in-house and what will you buy from a supplier? What will your supply chain look like, and how will you optimize it along with your manufacturing operations? BCG brings expertise in:
You must decide not only in which locations your plants and distribution centers sit but also how they’re optimized for such particulars as regulations, logistics, taxes, and duties. BCG helps clients make the best decisions by analyzing future demand models, cost drivers in shipping and logistic costs, and manufacturing and supply requirements. We assist through our:
BCG helps evaluate your supply chain. We view your global manufacturing operations through an integrated lens, and this comprehensive and holistic perspective ensures that everything from your lean manufacturing practices to your use of advanced robotics performs at a world-class level, from end to end. We help you envision and build:
BCG’s manufacturing consulting clients enjoy access to a broad range of resources, including our Innovation Center for Operations and Global Operations Centers. The following are among the tools and offerings we deliver.
For a car company, BCG focused on the what question: Should the company make or buy certain products? To arrive at a comprehensive answer, we evaluated relative costs and the strategic importance of parts and processes; modeled external prices; and then compared those projections with in-house prices. As a result, our client slashed expenses within its production network by $120 million per year.
A pharmaceutical company asked BCG to optimize its production network. When we identified the best locations for offshore outsourcing, the company was able to recapture up to 55% of the cost of goods sold.
An industrial goods company was experiencing an unwanted byproduct of its success: an unwieldy production system and, by extension, unclear KPIs. BCG designed and then implemented a system to apply standardized metrics across plants, thus paving the way for $30 million in savings.
True masters of digitization use shared data to improve existing applications of technology as well as to implement applications that would not otherwise be possible.
Companies can reduce costly delays and add value by building agile into their factories.
To succeed in a future of electric vehicles, manufacturers must understand and prepare for the profound effects of this transformation on operations and labor requirements.
Shifting tariffs grab the headlines, but the rise of Southeast Asia and differences in worker productivity are also altering the cost equation for global manufacturing.
