Operations are all about making things happen. Imagine you're backstage at a concert; operations are the crew ensuring the lights, sound, and stage setup are all perfect for the show.
In a business, operations are the day-to-day activities that keep the wheels turning, from making products to delivering services. Let's use McDonald's as an example to see operations in action.
How do operations fit into the broader picture of a business? In the grand scheme of things, operations work hand in hand with other aspects of the business, such as marketing, finance, and human resources, to ensure the company's success.
Together, these functions create a symphony of activities that drive the business forward, with operations playing a critical role in ensuring the business performs as a cohesive and efficient whole, delivering value to customers and stakeholders alike.
Operations consulting is when experts come in to help a company work smarter, faster, and more cost-effectively. Their goal is to find ways for their clients to deliver quality products and services like a well-oiled machine.
For example, imagine McDonald's wants to serve up their famous Big Macs even quicker, keep their costs down, and make sure every burger is as good as the last.
Operations consulting is all about processes – and the goal here is to tweak and improve the processes that McDonald's already has in place. Operations consultants look at every step to find improvements, ensuring that the company can deliver better service to you while also saving on costs. It's all about making the company run better.
You might wonder why businesses hire operations consultants. Wouldn't their own people be the best ones to improve their processes? Yes and no.
Here are a few reasons why businesses hire external consultants.
Expertise & experience: Operations consultants have typically worked with a variety of clients across different sectors, gaining insights into effective strategies and common pitfalls. This depth of experience means they can quickly identify problems and propose solutions that internal teams, who may be too close to the day-to-day operations, might overlook.
Objective perspective: When you're deeply involved in the operations of your own business, it can be challenging to critically assess your work or recognize inefficiencies. Consultants, being detached from internal politics and biases, can provide honest, straightforward advice on where and how improvements can be made.
Resource allocation: Even if a business could optimize its processes internally, doing so can divert essential resources away from its core activities. Consultants allow companies to stay focused on their primary objectives, handling the heavy lifting of analysis and implementation of new processes without disrupting daily operations.
Where operations focus on the "how" of day-to-day activities and processes—ensuring efficiency, quality, and delivery—strategy deals with the "what" and "why": defining the organization's direction, goals, and the overarching approach to achieve these goals.
Here are the differences between strategy consulting and operations consulting.
| Strategy consulting | Operations consulting |
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Clients are mainly CEOs |
Clients are mainly COOs (Chief Operating Officers) |
| Helps companies figure out how to grow, beat the competition, and change to stay ahead. | Helps make a company run smoother, cheaper, and more efficiently. |
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Answers questions like:
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Answers questions like:
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At some firms, you can choose to specialize in either strategy or operations (or other types of consulting).
When I started at Bain, I had the choice to be a strategy consultant, an operations consultant, among other types of consultants.
I applied to be a strategy consultant so I worked on a lot of strategy projects, but I also opted for operations projects when I had a chance.
For fresh grads, it is a lot of time on implementation, for example helping turn a strategy into a reality. This could be working on a company's supply chain down to building dashboards.
– Former consultant @ Bain / Founder @ My Consulting Offer
To get an idea of what operations consultants do, let's take a look at some real-world projects.
An airline company is using too much fuel, their flights are often delayed or disrupted, and when things go wrong, it takes them ages to get back on track.
Operations consultants are called in for help. The consultants do a deep dive into the airline’s operations, checking out how they do things, talking to pilots, crew, and managers, and even watching how planes are prepared for flights. They use some smart tools and analyses to pinpoint exactly where things are going wrong and why.
The consulting team provides solutions like:
... And they stick around as trusted advisors to keep guiding the airline’s operations team. As a result, the operations consulting team helps the airline fix its biggest problems, making sure flights are more reliable, fuel is used more wisely, and the whole operation runs more smoothly.
This is a real-world case that Boeing Global Services (the operations consulting arm of Boeing) helped solve – you can read the full case here.
A consumer electronics company sells its products (think: gadgets like laptops and phones) in the U.S. But there's a challenge! The stores that sell their products (think: places like Best Buy) have a strict rule: they need to get the products within 10 days of ordering them.
To make sure they can always deliver on time, the company fills several big warehouses with lots of their products. But, they have a little problem — they aren't quite sure how many of each gadget to keep. Sometimes, they have too many sitting around, and other times, not enough. Plus, getting the gadgets to the stores quickly is very expensive because they have to send them on fast planes, and that costs a lot of money.
So, the company calls for help from a team of operations consultants.
First, the consultants take a close look at how the company is doing things. They discover that it isn't just the fast planes that are costing a lot of money. Having too many products sitting in the warehouses was a problem too.
So, the consultants look at what other electronics companies are doing and come up with a big list of great ideas. They think about ways to store electronics smarter, so they don't have too many just sitting around. They also find out that making some electronics in Mexico can save money, and moving one of the warehouses can make delivery faster and cheaper.
They share their ideas with the company, who is very excited and start to try out the new plans right away. By listening to the consultants, the company is able to save a lot of money — over $10 million!
This is a real project that DHL's operations consultants worked on – you can read the full case here.
We hope this gives you a better idea of operations consulting as a career. To get a better idea of what opportunities are out there, check out all the internships we have in the field of consulting!