We start with dirt, water and labor and work our way up. In other words, we look at your product from first principles, and we look at the components from first principles, etc. When we get down to the earth we're ready - we understand the value chain. When we purchase materials, we look at the opportunities to partition that chain, and we choose the most effective transition points for you and your products. No, we don't go to extremes on every study - we don't have to. We've been down those roads before, and we take advantage of our expertise and experience, but when technology or production techniques change, we look again. When we are done, you will know that you have deployed the optimal value-producing procurement strategy, and lest we miss an opportunity to say it again: "we are ALL about value".
This is an operations study that seeks to increase firm value by managing costs and purchases. We start with the obvious - how to buy better, but we go much deeper. When should we build versus buy, how should we structure purchases, when should we partner, how should we partner, etc. We look beyond costs into risks, management overhead, vendor leverage, total capacity constraints, etc. We are strong advocates for activity-based costing, perhaps extremely so, and we use this as a basis for value analysis. We champion bootstrapping as a funding mechanism for almost all process changes (excluding major asset deployments).