A Strategic Cup of Tea
Firm: Tigris Consulting, New York
• Founded: 1996
• Specialty: Supply chain management
• No. of consultants: 80
• No. of employees: 100
The supplier network for a large consumer product, manufacturing, or pharmaceutical company is a massive, complex web of raw materials producers, production partners, and distribution facilities. So when companies are looking for ways to lower costs and improve the quality of products or services they're buying, they are finding it a daunting task to sift through myriad systems to find supplier data.
That's where New York–based Tigris Consulting found its niche in 1996. Today, Tigris works alongside larger consulting firms on strategic sourcing initiatives and builds off the client's existing software to pull data from disparate systems, perform business analysis, and recommend process improvements.
"We deal with the business customer who needs to understand a particular issue, as opposed to the IT customer," explains Brent Habig, Tigris CEO and founder. "The challenge for companies is, 'What is the data that we need? What do we have and where is it?' The information often is not just in transactional systems. It's scattered all over the enterprise. We gather, validate, and format the data to model a business process."
For example, working with the Lipton Tea unit of Unilever Corp., Tigris helped improve how it handled the supply chain process of blending tea. "We helped them pull together their purchase processes with their blend process so that they could blend based on the cost of ingredients for the process." This involved researching all of the options on how they could blend tea, and then gathering data on the inventory positions of each product and market data on purchase prices. Tigris then performed a small pilot to demonstrate the value of pulling the purchasing and blending process together. In its first year of use, the new solution saved Unilever about $3 million.
Other blue chip clients include Nabisco, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Georgia-Pacific, and New York Life.
In 2001, Tigris showed 30 percent revenue growth, "which I think reflects the relevance of our offering in today's market climate," Habig says. In the last five years, the self-funded firm has grown 13,000 percent. While Habig admits that the skyrocketing growth can't last forever, he sees a very bright future for the firm.
Staying ahead of software offerings that could potentially provide the same information "is certainly a challenge that we face," Habig notes. "But our role is to come in and tailor that information to a very specific process for our clients. We're projecting solid growth over the next four to five years in the 25 to 30 percent range."
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