Saving Money on Management Consultants

Saving Money on Management Consultants

If you found out how much your competitors were actually spending on management consultants would you be pleasantly surprised or flabbergasted?

To illustrate, let’s take maintenance for example. For identical companies, some management consultants could be working up to 2-days/week, while some spend only 4-hours/year! This can lead to a discrepancy in the tens of thousands of dollars in fees!!

Why the discrepancy?

Often, businesses begin implementing management systems for certification purposes that were forced onto them (eg. when a possibility for a government tender opens up).

Due to this urgency (or sometimes from a lack of information), they do not spend the time to understand what the certification process involves and they rush into putting something in place before doing their homework.

Especially in these cases, we find 3 common issues:

1. Unnecessary Complexity. The systems designed are unnecessarily complex. As years go by the business evolves and more processes come into play. The complexity of the management system then increases. This generates a LOT of unnecessary work.

2. Badly Integrated Systems. Sometimes a company’s multiple systems are called “Integrated” but are not specifically designed so. Quality, Safety and Environment systems are placed next to each other and contain redundancies and contradictions – hardly an integrated approach. A recipe for confusion and convolution.

3. Over-Dependency. Where internal staff are not trained with the expertise to maintain the system, a management consultant is forced to come in to fill the role – an avoidable cost.

The Solution?

Mindset Shift. Clients should understand the potential for management systems to improve their businesses and their bottom lines. A client who implicitly understands this would naturally demand improvement of their management systems.

Long View. Engage a management consultant that is genuinely helping your business move towards a Self-Maintaining System in the immediate-term. Don’t put off what can be done today as it will save you tens of thousands of dollars in fees tomorrow.

The Role of Certification Bodies

Beyond verification of compliance and the issuance of certificates, certification bodies indirectly play a role in cost savings for the client.

Fundamentally, certifications exist to enhance and add value to the business. Therefore the function of Certification Bodies goes beyond the basic job of auditing and verifying system compliance. A savvy client and an experienced management consultant will work together with certification bodies to go beyond technical/paper-compliance to truly add value to the business.

In these scenarios, a simple, well-designed and integrated system can save money and add a lot of value in the long run.