Strategy + Advisory

• Strategic Planning + Implementation
• Enterprise Performance Management
• Merger Planning + Integration
• Outsourcing + Shared Services

Strategic Planning + Implementation

Strategic planning at North Highland is done collaboratively, with your knowledge and our experience joined to formulate a strategic path customized to your organization. Starting with an analytical foundation of both the marketplace and your organization, we foster the insight and creativity needed to forge a unique focus in today's increasingly competitive environment. Our market-centered approach concentrates on understanding and clarifying the distinctive qualities your organization must demonstrate to stand out. Our breadth of knowledge across all organizational functions then allows us to link and align those distinctive qualities to specific outcomes and a clear implementation path.

We worked with the leadership of a global industrial manufacturing company to identify the significant changes in their market and developed a detailed implementation plan that globally prioritized their resources to execute the plan. A national publishing company had significant market share in one particular channel but needed to expand into other, more competitive channels to continue to grow. North Highland worked with the executive team to ensure common understanding of the situation, opportunities, and challenges in various channels and then assisted with development of the right strategic plan. After development, projects were aligned and rationalized around the strategy, and a program office was established to ensure consistent prioritization and execution of initiatives.

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Enterprise Performance Management

In today's competitive world, would you bet your company's success on a strategy in which you have no comprehensive understanding of the direction, the processes that most materially influence its execution, or the measures that directly reflect your organization's performance against it? Given the fact that less than 10% of created strategies are ever effectively executed, most companies are doing just that. They lose their focus when the most critical element of strategy execution comes due, just "getting it done in the day to day," despite the significant investment involved in developing their strategy.

North Highland has successfully identified and integrated the elements necessary to execute both strategically and tactically through a basic set of fundamentals found in our Enterprise Performance Management Framework. We have worked extensively with a wide variety of organizations and industries to more precisely articulate their strategies and align the organization towards execution. Equally critical to that execution, we've helped those clients identify linkages between the processes that drive the strategy and the measures that reflect performance against it. In our experience with a wide range of clients, applying these fundamentals to the management of an organization has proven to be the differentiator between those companies that succeed and those that fail in the long-term execution of their strategies.

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Merger Planning + Integration

Mergers and acquisitions are continuing in record numbers in the U.S. and abroad. Mergers today are more complex, and the benefits are more elusive than ever. North Highland is helping some of the largest companies in the world achieve the merger results they promise. We bring extensive industry and merger and integration experience gained from over 50 successful merger programs.

We helped one of the largest financial services companies in North America successfully complete a very complex program to integrate customers, products, services, and thousands of new associates for the merger of two large companies. We were involved in each phase of the integration, from helping define the future state operating model to refining business processes, all the way through managing the actual weekend conversion events. In year one we helped the combined company achieve over $1 billion in net new sales through cross-selling of new products and services through existing sales channels, while achieving significant cost savings by combining functions and leveraging best processes and systems.

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Outsourcing + Shared Services

Nearly all of the Fortune 500 implemented shared services and outsourcing strategies between 1985 and 2005. What are the differences between those companies that have achieved competitive advantage and those that have been disappointed in the results? Our advisory services focus on helping clients navigate from strategy to implementation of those complex but promising business models, leveraging lessons learned from our efforts on behalf of some of the largest and most successful companies in the U.S. and Europe. Because we are experienced and independent (i.e., we don't have an outsourcing business), we can focus on providing the best advice rather than on selling "solutions."

North Highland helped a large national company navigate the early stages of a shared service and outsourcing strategy, focusing on generating quick cost savings that help fund the larger effort to build scalable and efficient back-office processes and systems. Our approach has yielded $4 million in savings that will help fund their shared services program.

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