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Companies still keen to consultUNDISPUTED king of management consultants in South Africa is Andersen Consulting, with a staff of 900 and growing at the rate of several hundred a year. Revenue growth in 1997 was 34%, continuing the 30%-plus annual growth of the past five years. The Andersen branding and worldwide reputation undoubtedly contributed to this astonishing growth trajectory but, more importantly, the SA business environment evinces a readiness to embrace change as never before, says managing partner Ian Armstrong. "The globalisation of the SA economy has introduced greater competition in the domestic market," says Armstrong. "Domestic companies are finding themselves up against some of the most efficient operators in the world, and this has forced them to look at almost every aspect of their businesses." In the laager economy, companies were happy to defend domestic market share and seldom ventured outside the country. Now the domestic market is under attack from a variety of new players, both foreign and local. Virtually every company of size wants to know how it measures up against the best in the world and is prepared to invest heavily to achieve this exalted status. Three key sources of work are corporate transformation, supply chain management and enterprise-wide software package implementation, which generally requires re-engineering business processes. Andersen Consulting's specialisations cover a wide spread of sectors and disciplines, one reason it is regarded as an obvious port of call for companies seeking improvement. Transformation typically involves benchmarking a company's processes against the best in the world, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and implementing a programme of change. Change comes in a variety of guises, from process re-engineering to strategy change, behavioural change and systems implementation. Armstrong says larger corporations typically engage several firms of consultants with unique specialisations, though getting them all to work towards a common objective requires careful management. "Companies use consultants for different reasons. They may not have the right skills in-house, or not enough skills, and they may need outside help in implementing a change programme. Increasingly, we find they want an international consulting firm capable of bringing its global experience to bear. Companies like the fact that we can bring out experts from abroad who have worked in similar companies facing similar problems elsewhere in the world. The ability to tap into this expertise is a major advantage for the international firms." In analysing a company, consultants must give the bad news as well as the good: "You're under the microscope for the first few weeks and sometimes the person who hired you turns out to be part of the problem. "SA companies are getting the performance message. More and more of our work involves performance measurement, and all too often these measurements are missing in companies." These measurements might include the number of days it takes to produce the monthly financial statements, inventory statistics or the average number of debtors days. Speed of information is universally recognised as one of the new competitive frontiers, as it allows management to make better and faster decisions.
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