Perimeter

This sector covers the design, manufacture and maintenance in operational conditions of heavy equipment assets (excluding aerospace) and infrastructure: rolling stock (trains, trams, underground trains), energy-related systems (power plants, transformers, alternators, transmission or distribution equipment), industrial manufacturing systems (machines, handling equipment, etc.) and, in general, complex systems that are made to order or often engineered to order. 

Context

This sector is seriously impacted by:

• high capital outlay in the design and manufacture of products, a fact that makes their maintenance in operational condition one of the key factors in the economic performance of operators,
• technically advanced and fast-changing products with long life cycles, and with a control of configurations that make supply chain management all the more complex,
• very long procurement and manufacturing cycles, combined with poor supplier performance and globally insufficient procurability of products and certain manufacturing processes,
• high sensitivity to economic cycles and changes in the energy sector,
• exponential growth in demand in certain parts of the world, where investments in the transport or energy infrastructure are very high,
• emerging competition from new players proposing simpler but cheaper product offers.

Stakes

In order to protect their positions and achieve sustainable growth, industrial operators in this sector must:

• review their innovation and development processes: platforming to gradually progress from pure ETO to product configuration, optimization of engineering and project resources on a worldwide scale (which investment and/or specialization in which region, how to manage critical resources, etc.), how to improve the efficiency of projects (lean engineering), etc.
• optimize their upstream supply chain to cut working capital requirements and keep project deadlines under control: global / local arbitration in the sourcing and supplier management strategies, improvement of supplier performance, control of raw material and component flows, optimization of component stocks, etc.
• improve their industrial manufacturing performance: industrialize processes in an industry structured around very small production series, cut production cycles, improve productivity and quality, etc.
• increase the share of revenue from services: define the offers and build the corresponding operational model (tracking of the installed base, spare parts supply chain, industrial strategy for repair and overhaul systems), optimize field services, etc.

How can Argon Consulting assist you ?

We assist our customers in this sector in the transformation needed to rise to these challenges, from the assessment of the issues they face to the application of a range of operational performance levers:

• control and optimization of engineering resources (R&D supply chain), efficiency of processes, Lean engineering,
• improvement of project management: multiple-project and project planning, processes, tools and organization, matching of workload to the capacity of the engineering and production resources, etc.
• purchasing and optimization of the upstream supply chain (sourcing strategy, control of supplier performance, reduction of component stocks, deployment of VMI and the procurement performance in general),
• industrial performance and lean management (having shorter and more reliable cycles, cost cutting) of new products’ production,
• development of the after-sales service offer:
  • positioning of the offer (business plan),
  • sizing, deployment and optimization of resources needed to maintain assets in operational order (industrial strategy, forecasting and planning of maintenance, repair and overhaul flows, spare parts supply chain, creation of a field service organization, etc.),
  • efficiency of processes: Lean management methods applied to service and production processes (maintenance, repair and overhaul).

Argon Consulting’s customers include the SNCF, EDF Hydraulique, DCNS, Thales, Arcelor.