Performance improvement has been one of the fastest growing markets in UK consulting over the past 10 years. Customers who want to know how to make fundamental changes in their business and strip out inefficiencies include large financial services firms and public sector organisations.

Member companies of the Management Consultancies Association (MCA), which represents 70% of the UK consulting industry, reported earnings of more than £700m for operational consulting and process reengineering last year. For consultants working in this field, the assignments present a high level of challenge as clients increasingly demand clearly measurable change over a fixed time.

Robert MacDougall, 42, of Axon Global, winner of the Performance Improvement Consultant of the Year award, studied marketing in Strathclyde and has since worked in Singapore, America, India and Australia. Underlying his approach is calculating the return on capital employed to determine whether or not a project is viable.

“Even if it is in customer service, what performance improvement should be doing is increasing the profits,” he says. But the public sector, he adds, can have a different framework: “There, it’s about councils investing where it is most appropriate.”

MacDougall’s experience has taught him that it is often a case of looking at something in a different way. At a leading oil company in Australia, he says, the accounts department was proud of the systems it had to handle customers whose accounts had been placed on hold due to lack of credit. “But they should really have been looking at why so many of their customers were on credit hold in the first place.”

MacDougall’s main competition, he says, is not other consultancies or software giants such as Oracle, but a client’s other priorities. “A big utilities company has to constantly spend capital on its network. Why would they spend it on a big IT project rather than its network? We have got to help companies articulate where that investment is going to tie back into the financial income of the company.”

Clients are demanding results quicker than ever, he adds. “They can’t wait 18 months for the benefits so we do load them on to the front end of the project.” The way to do this is by tackling procurement, he says, because this takes a large proportion of the budget and savings can come in renegotiating contracts.

Richard Pharro, awards judge and managing director of business accreditation firm APM Group, says that the judges were impressed by MacDougall’s overall level of commitment and understanding of his client’s business in the case study he presented to the panel.

“He was very focused on how the client could achieve the maximum benefits, such as by matching each member of his team with a person on the client side. He was helping the organisation to improve its own skills base.”

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