Natural Gas, Electric and Propane Energy. Companies need to track competitive dynamics, regulatory changes, and advances in technology to compete and thrive in their sector. Trends indicate that only exceptional managerial discipline will help companies survive the turmoil ahead.
Case Study: Customer Acquisition Strategy for an Energy Association
We provide both high-level strategic advice and hands-on expertise to improve performance. Our work is balanced between service to the corporate center and to business units (e.g., marketing, upstream), on a variety of strategic and operational issues.
Strategic Advice
We offer our clients distinctive thinking on strategic issues by continually investing in knowledge development aimed at understanding broader industry issues and trends. Examples of our current research include:
Retail: What is the future of petroleum retailing for major oil companies? Many are choosing to exit the business in the face of increasing competition, falling margins, and limited retailing skills. Is this shortsighted on their part?
LNG: How will the increasing importance of LNG change gas pricing dynamics? How will it impact regional markets and the value chain? What are the implications for players?
NOCs: How can NOCs improve their performance? NOCs typically face significant barriers in achieving high performance levels because of their focus on a country’s resources.
Exploration: Which strategies and operating models will reposition exploration as a vehicle for growth? Increasing challenges in accessing upstream Growth at attractive returns is forcing oil companies to rethink their approach to exploration.
Refiners: What are the strategic implications for producers, refiners, and integrated players in the volatile environment of crude oil and refined product markets.
We serve clients in three functional areas:
Performance Approaches
We also offer our clients distinctive, hands-on approaches, underpinned by strong functional capabilities, for improving performance in each part of the value chain:
Retail Marketing: We offer a detailed diagnostic to quantify improvement potential, along with targeted improvement modules that focus on identifying key value drivers and concrete improvement targets and objectives in the retail gasoline sector. Modules include store operations, front line performance, category management, pricing, channel management, launching new formats, and brand repositioning. Each module includes diagnostics and client case studies.
Commercial Sales & Marketing: Commercial sales and marketing is a significantly under-exploited lever in improving downstream returns. Our integrated go-to-market approach focuses on capturing sources of value leakage within 5 key levers (pricing, channel, sales force, branding, innovation) and pulling key organizational enablers such as front-line capabilities.
Upstream: We believe significant value creation potential exists in upstream petroleum operations. Our work aligns strategy with operating systems and organization, and leverages thinking on lean manufacturing and change management.
Refining: We have years of experience helping our clients improve operational performance at their refineries. Ours is an integrated approach that both diagnoses and streamlines operating practices using lean maintenance and optimization tools, and also implements change management techniques involving mindsets and behaviors.