FT identifies QR_ as leading automotive management consultancy for third consecutive year

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FT identifies QR_ as leading automotive management consultancy for third consecutive year

Based on client and peer feedback, QR_ features on the FT’s Leading Management Consultants list for the third consecutive year. Here’s our take on how we can mix it with the heavy hitters and in many cases come out on top.

Published 28 Jan 2022

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Based on client and peer feedback, QR_ once again features on the FT’s UK’s Leading Management Consultants list. Here’s our take on how we can mix it with the heavy hitters of professional services and in many cases come out on top. 

1. We are doers and improvers who prioritise action over action lists; outcome over output.

Rather than being a pure consultancy, QR_ combines strategic insight through business improvement consulting with hands-on operational implementation via PDM analysts and SMEs supported by digital tools via the ‘Special Projects’ development team and a panel of internal and external advisors available to every client.

With our focus on engineered products, portfolios and supply chains, our consultants, analysts and developers can be domain experts familiar with stakeholder workflows and clients' enterprise architecture. We can get to work faster, less obtrusively and still deliver pertinent outcomes. 

This combination of insight combined with the means and tools to accelerate and de-risk projects and programmes is well captured by our involvement in the VCUK consortium. Take a look at a more technical explanation, or a fun end of project video.  

2. We target the cause, not the symptoms; data is absolutely the right place to focus.

QR_ have moved beyond our early focus on product data management, but the foundational impact of data quality and ability to extract decision-driving reports remains. Data is an organisation’s lifeblood, and a key aim should be transforming this information into knowledge.

Previous benchmarking for QRonos, our BTRS tool, revealed as little as 14 percent of a part’s development time is tracked, meaning early issues and slippage only become visible as production approaches, resulting in a ‘hockey stick’ release curve necessitating expensive remedial actions such a tooling changes, emergency logistics or underutilisation of engineering teams waiting for blocked components to catch up. Time spent on data quality early in a project delivers significantly improves engineering output throughout a programme, while also reducing the risk of burnout and disgruntlement among client engineering teams. 

3. Transforming without the headaches of transformation

90 percent of businesses are thinking about digitalisation, but only 10 percent are confident with their strategy. This consensus on the ‘why’, but not the ‘how’ is often embedded by difficult to quantify RoI and a disconnect between theory and the realities of working with complex enterprise architecture dating back decades.

QR_’s approach is to view digital transformation as a means to an end and therefore best executed when used to deliver live projects. This emphasis on making digital work, and now, focuses minds on where existing blockages and buckets in digital plumbing exist, while adding urgency and time limits that force concurrent thinking and doing. Clients have consistently praised our delivery of programme-specific and whole-business changing results that build upon existing systems and process frameworks, rather than relying on ground-up transformation projects that are often unwieldly, unpopular, and expensive and indifferently effective.

Thank you to all our team, clients and partners for making 2021 what it was. Keep an eye on us in 2022 for some interesting developments!

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A note on QR_’s Solutions:

QR_ partners with clients to improve engineering efficiency, accelerate and de-risk complex programmes, and unlock immediate value through digital transformations.

These outcome-driven solutions release the full value of people, process, systems and data, enabling clients to get products and technology to market faster and more efficiently.

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