Retraining the Trainers
Firm: Kepner-Tregoe, Inc., Skillman, NJ
• Founded: 1958
• Specialty: Systematic problem-solving
• No. of consultants: 150 to 200
• No. of employees: 250
Over the past several years, Kepner-Tregoe, Inc., has had to reinvent itself as the demand for its traditional training and human resources consulting services has ebbed. It has invested several million dollars in the development of innovative software and related consulting services and has emerged as an agile innovator.
When the business started 44 years ago, Kepner-Tregoe devised thinking processes for operating an organization around strategic planning and project management. It trained middle managers to become senior executives at major clients in the manufacturing, pulp and paper, and chemical industries, to name a few.
"For the first 25 years, nobody did anything like this, but after that it became competitive within the companies that we had trained and with the people from our own company starting me-too businesses," recalls CEO Bruce Keener. After their market share eroded and two economic recessions passed, the firm decided to develop applications from their methodologies to satisfy much more far-reaching needs of an organization, such as cost management and strategic alignment. They also developed consulting services to complement their solutions and help companies execute strategies they had already established.
On the consulting side, for example, the help-desk manager of a major technology client thought that his team was resolving customer problems quickly. But customer feedback showed that these problems weren't being truly resolved at all. "Callers came back two or three times or projects were escalated," says William Shine, Kepner-Tregoe's executive vice president for North America. "Quality control was turning against them."
Kepner-Tregoe spent two years restructuring an issue resolution system and instructing the firm's people. The new processes "improved their batting average," Shine adds.
The introduction of its eThink software also brought Kepner-Tregoe's business into the 21st century, Keener says. The application, which runs off Oracle applications, is used in consulting assignments with clients to provide a common language around solving problems, implementing projects, and making decisions. The application is not fully Web-enabled yet, but Keener expects full compatibility within a year.
Kepner-Tregoe goes to market through affiliated relationships with other consulting and training firms in the U.S. and abroad, and so far the European side of the business has seen more success than that at home.
The firm's business is evenly split between U.S. and foreign companies. Last year, "the U.S. business was stagnant but our operating profit was reasonably healthy. We didn't grow, but we didn't go into a bad position," says Keener. The news was brighter in Japan, where business grew an average of 15 percent each year between 1999 and 2001. Business in Thailand grew 35 percent from 2000 through 2001.
To keep business growing, Keener says that the firm will maintain its focus on existing clients and look for larger pieces of business from a smaller group of key clients. "We want to go a mile deep, not a mile wide."
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