Developing a Three-Year Strategic Playbook for a Global Manufacturing Company
A global leader in furniture design and manufacturing reached out to Clarkston Consulting to develop a three-year strategic playbook to define the company’s path forward. In the past, the company was seen as the de facto innovator in their space and was the primary manufacturer in their product category. As the category became commoditized over time and margin began shrinking, the company recognized that they needed a new global manufacturing strategy moving forward.
The organization had tried to pivot its strategy in the past and had not been successful. Clarkston was brought in to determine the best plan for the company’s future in order to accelerate sales growth, diversify the customer base, and increase profitability.
The project began with an internal evaluation of margin compression, customers, and the most critical competitive and operational challenges facing the business. Clarkston then identified key trends shaping the furniture industry and completed a detailed analysis to align with leadership on the primary strengths and weaknesses of the company and critical opportunities and threats in the marketplace. Leveraging these inputs and partnering with the client’s leadership team, Clarkston facilitated the creation of a new vision and guiding principles, using our proprietary Enterprise Destination Mapping methodology.
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With the foundation in place, Clarkston determined more than 10 potential strategies that the company could utilize to regain market share and grow profitability. To provide inspiration and creative insights, Clarkston leveraged the Strategic Innovation methodology to highlight companies across different industries who had successfully solved similar challenges and facilitated an ideation workshop with the leadership team. After each strategy was thoroughly vetted with the executive team, Clarkston drove alignment and selection of the final strategies for the future.
After the top four strategies were selected, Clarkston led the definition of robust roadmaps to ensure successful execution of the strategies to drive profitable growth and competitive advantage in the market. This included identification of the critical capabilities required to execute and a gap analysis with current capabilities, the development of more than 40 new initiatives in support of the strategies, and the funding, timelines, resourcing, and success measures associated with each. Ultimately, this became the strategic playbook the client needed to kickstart their transformation.
