Going to market through deeper Industry specialization, alliances and digital solutions are among several trends highlighted by Kennedy Consulting Research and Advisory affecting strategy and operations (S&O) consulting providers. Accenture's recent move to acquire Schlumberger Business Consulting (SBC), the management consulting arm of the world's largest oilfield service provider, Schlumberger, illustrates these trends.
The deal rationale behind Accenture's acquisition of SBC is to strengthen its ability to assist upstream oil and gas companies beyond its core offering in digital-driven transformations toward more strategic services including strategy alignment, portfolio optimization and operations excellence (from drilling management to production optimization). SBC's deep industry knowledge, technical abilities and operations experience in the upstream energy sector will further Accenture Strategy's goal of extending and deepening its industry-specific strategy consulting services.
In its report on Asset Intensive Operations Excellence, Kennedy found that deeply process-oriented manufacturing companies, like those in the Oil & Gas sector, place a premium on providers whom are able to deploy consultants with deep technical industry knowledge obtained through real world project experience. And accordingly, this is putting pressure on strategy & operations consultants to beef up capabilities and deliver services through dedicated industry practices.
In the current post-crisis environment, many companies are reluctant to make new capital investments and are pressured to get more out of their existing, aging assets. In response, Kennedy finds that many firms are implementing reliability and maintenance programs to drive improvement in availability and utilization on a plant-by-plant or equipment-specific basis. This need is triggering client demand for consulting services around maintenance, reliability and operations improvement, particularly in commodity-oriented sectors that missed the wave of operational improvement that swept supply chain organizations over the last quarter century.
Many firms in asset-intensive industries commence their journey to drive equipment improvement by implementing digital solutions like enterprise asset management (EAM) and computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) intended to capture and integrate performance data and maintenance history of assets over their operating lifecycle. In this respect, Accenture's current offering serves clients well; but if it chooses, Accenture can use SBC to build on this offering to become a leading provider in the emerging areas of machine-to-machine connectivity or the "Industrial Internet of Things" (IoT).
With its traditional strength in IT infrastructure and shared services, Accenture is in good position to lead the move toward digitizing assets by sensorizing equipment allowing clients to capture, store and monitor asset performance data—particularly in decentralized, field based environments like in the energy sector.
With this critical enabling infrastructure in place, SBC can apply its capabilities in lean manufacturing, reliability engineering and other technical methods to build on Accenture's platform and help clients use this data to not only make better tactical decisions, but also develop broader operating and predictive maintenance strategies that provide step-change performance improvement.
While it is still early days into the acquisition, it will be exciting to see how these two firms combine and turn their consulting skills inward onto themselves in realizing the potential synergies and strategic options available to them.
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