Argon Consulting’s mission is to support its customers in the transformation of their operations in the fields of purchasing, production, maintenance or distribution, in order to enduringly improve their performance.

Reducing stocks or cycles, cutting costs, optimizing or improving the quality of service and, in general, making operations more efficient and more agile, are the objectives that we share with our customers, who come from all industries where the achievement of these targets is a primary concern: manufacturing, retail, transport, energy, utilities, etc.

In order to implement a change project with our customers that focuses on the performance of their operations, we must deliver support in three dimensions.

High-level expertise of their sector and their operational problems

Supply chain issues, in the broadest sense, are so complex and so specific that only external support, focusing uniquely on the methodology or input from benchmarks, appears to be sufficient in order to quickly be in a position to:

• understand and challenge existing methods or ideas for improvement,
• propose innovative solutions,
• assess the real economic benefits of the opportunities.

This is why our Associates, who are all specialized in their respective fields, become closely involved in the content of our projects by bringing their own experience and their global vision. It is also for this reason that we hire consultants from the best engineering schools, who are capable of understanding and analyzing complex problems and quickly providing our customers with quantified responses to assist them in decision taking.

The capacity to integrate cross-functionality

Our projects to improve operational performance have taught us that most of the sources of progress lie in the global optimization between functions. There are many examples:

• the ability of the Procurement department to take supply chain criteria into consideration when selecting, tracking and assessing suppliers,
• global arbitration between productivity and stocks,
• simultaneous analysis of the logistics system and the customer service offer,
• etc.

This is why cross-functionality is our playing field. Our added value is delivered in two ways:

• pointing out, explaining and objectivizing these difficult inter-functional arbitrations to our customers. We achieve this through our strong command of these cross-functional subjects and through our capacity to clearly state the gains achieved in order to speed up the decision-making processes.
• working with our customers on the governance of their operations, in order to make sure that the right arbitrations are made in the long term: responsibility of stocks, involvement of the functions in the decision-making instances (e.g., S&OP), customer/internal supplier contracts, etc.

An approach based on the adoption of solutions and the achievement of enduring results

At Argon Consulting, we are convinced that, no matter how precise a target is, it will never be reached if it is not shared and understood. This is why we appoint highly experienced teams, that are sufficiently credible to obtain management buy-in for the strategy and to mobilize the entire organization, right from the start of the project. In the later implementation phase, we focus on the fields where we offer the highest added value:

• construction of the change road map, organization into projects and definition of the targets,
• initial impetus in each of the projects,
• close involvement in strategic and/or technically complex projects,
• continuous supply of business input for the operational application of the target,
• overall control and benefits tracking,
• transfer of skills and know-how to the customers’ teams.