Consulting Overview:

A consulting firm or a consultancy is a service providing business comprising of a panel of experts

or consultants who offer professional advice to a person or an organization at a specific cost or fee.
A consultancy firm basically targets the company’s executives and provides them with consultants
often referred to as industry specialists.

They are the ones to guide down the company’s plan of action in order to achieve the company’s
objectives or make up a strategy before the start of a new project. A consulting firm might also
come handy in the time of crisis.

Types of Consultants:

● Strategy consultant
● Management consultant
● Operations consultant
● Financial advisory consultant
● Human Resource consultant
● IT consultant

Top Ranked Consulting Firms:

McKinsey & Company:

McKinsey & Company is a world-renowned management consultant firm. The company is based
in America and was founded 92 years ago in 1926 by James O McKinsey and Marvin Bower.
The company provides its service worldwide. Its headquarters is located in New York City with
127 offices spread across the world. It has a network of more than 27,000 employees making it a
billion dollar company with a revenue of more than 10 Billion!

It follows a strict culture of work and ethics with highly motivated and zealous employees. The
company values traits like loyalty, integrity, and dynamism.

Boston Consulting Group:

Boston Consulting Group, Inc, also known as BCG. is a privately incorporated management
consulting firm.
It was founded by Bruce Henderson in the year 1963. The company has a revenue of $6.3 million
as of 2017 with more than 90 offices at different locations across the world. It has more than 16,000
employees working worldwide.

BCG was ranked 4th in Fortune’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” in 2018.

Bain & Company:

Bain and Company is a top consulting firm specialized in the area of management consultancy. It
was founded in the year 1973 and its headquarters are located in Boston, Massachusetts.
The company is an incorporated partnership with William W. Bain and Patrick F as its founders.
The company showed rapid growth in the early ’80s and was successful in generating a revenue
of $3.7-$4.5 Billion in the year 2017.
The company has its network spread in 59 locations worldwide with a force of 8,000 employees.

It has a number of awards in its name such as Consulting Magazine’s 2016 “Best Firms to Work
for” and was ranked in the Fortune magazine as the “100 best companies to work for” in the year
2018.

Deloitte:
Deloitte Consulting LLP is the world’s largest consulting firm and one of the big four accounting
firms and has one of the largest professional networks worldwide.
It was founded in 1845 by William Welch Deloitte in London and further expanded its operation
in New York in 1880.
The major services provided by Deloitte include Audit, Tax, Management Consulting, Financial
advisory, Risk Advisory, and Legal. Inside Public Accounting named Deloitte as #1 accounting
firm in 2017, and is also listed as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” by Fortune
magazine.

The company generated revenue of US$43.2 Billion in 2018 and has a working staff of 286,200
across the world with more than 100 operational locations, including China, India and Hong Kong.

PWC:
PricewaterhouseCoopers is a multinational business offering professional service to its clients
since 1998. The company’s headquarters is based in London, United Kingdom and is known as
the second largest professional services firm and also has its name amongst the Big Four Auditors.
It has a revenue of $41.3 Billion as of 2018 with 250,930 employees working worldwide. PwC has
a network of firms in 158 countries, at 743 locations. PricewaterhouseCoopers offers services in
assurance, advisory, tax advisory, strategy consulting, tax controversy, data and analytics,
management consulting, financial advisory, actuarial and legal.
Accenture Strategy:
Accenture is a globally accredited consulting firm renowned for management consulting and
provides professional services like strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. It was
founded in 1989. Formerly known as Anderson Consulting, the company was incorporated in
Dublin, Ireland on September 1, 2009.

Accenture generated revenue of US$39.4 Billion as of 2018 and has a workforce of 459,000
employees in more than 200 cities across the globe. The company also has a number of awards
and recognition in its name.

Oliver Wyman:
Oliver Wyman is an international management consulting company providing professional
services in banking and finance. It was originally founded in 1984 and has its headquarters located
in New York City, U.S.A. The present form of the firm came into effect in May 2007 when Oliver
Wyman joined with Mercer Management Consulting and Mercer Delta to become one firm named
Oliver Wyman. The company has more than 60 offices in Europe, the Americas, and the Asia
Pacific with 4,500 working employees in 27 countries. The company generated a revenue of US
$1.9 billion in 2017.

Oliver Wyman has been entitled in Fortune Magazine’s 2016 list of “100 Best Workplaces for
Millennials’. In 2016, it was listed in the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers list and also
ranked 6th on the Financial Times/Glassdoor Best Places to Work in Finance and Consulting (UK)
survey.

Analysis of Consulting Industry:

Management consulting is a $250 billion industry. It's big. It's growing. It's highly profitable. And
it's about to be disrupted.Whether the focus is strategy, operations, tax, finance, HR, or IT, business
consultants are a staple of corporate life. Today, over 700,000 consulting firms provide services
across virtually all aspects of business globally. From defining strategic direction to simply serving
as an additional pair of hands for outsourced work, consultants have become inextricably linked
to the success of most large organizations.

An industry becomes susceptible to disruption when it becomes entrenched in its longstanding

solutions and financial structure. Disruptive innovations provide simpler or more elegant solutions
to existing problems, enabled by new technology and often at a lower cost. Think portable
calculators versus computers, Amazon versus bookstores, Netflix versus Blockbuster, or digital
cameras versus film. Management consulting is not immune to the dynamics of disruption.
According to IBISWorld, for example, "the Management Consulting industry is in the mature stage
of its life cycle. The industry is characterized by growth in line with the overall economy, an
increasing number of industry players, and technological change based on improving efficiency
rather than developing entirely new services."In any industry, when the basis of competition
becomes efficiency versus innovation and new solutions, disruption lies on the horizon.

Flaws in Consulting Industry:

1. Labor intensive. Most consulting services rely on humans as the fundamental source of
research, analysis, recommendations, process definition, process management, and
facilitation.
2. Billable time-based business model. The fee structure underlying most consulting services
is tied to billable hours or days, which encourages lengthy, overstaffed engagements to
maximize revenue.
3. High margins. The cost of "goods" in consulting refers not to products but to people. The
billable rates of junior consultants in most large firms far exceed what they are paid by the
firms in which they work. Value pricing models also dramatically increase the profitability
of many projects and firms.
4. Time-bound value. With the increasing pace of change, the moment a research report,
competitive analysis, or strategic plan is delivered to a client, its currency and relevance
rapidly diminishes as new trends, issues, and unforeseen disrupters arise.
5. Knowledge commoditization. The models, templates, and tools of the consulting trade have
historically been kept "secret" by consultants and locked away as intellectual capital. The
"democratization" of just about everything, including management information and
knowledge, will continue so that anyone can access and apply "best practices" on their
own.

Future of Consulting:

Consulting 4.0:

The term consulting 4.0 borrows from the various industrial revolutions (from industry 1.0 to
industry 4.0), but is far from being as clearly defined. However, similiar to the fourth industrial
revolution, consulting 4.0 is proclaimed to have begun, spurred by interconnected digital
technology. Consulting 4.0 is more than the digitalisation of the consulting industry, though.
Consulting 4.0 describes the fundamental change of an industry which for a long time has escaped
the need to respond to the threats of disruption. This is pinpointed in the next section which
describes the causes and implications of these fundamental developments in the consulting
industry.

The factors which led to these disruptive changes in the consulting industry are many and varied.
The volatility and uncertainty that have increasingly come to characterize the global economic
environment as well as the economic downturn have to some extent contributed to the progress of
disruptive forces. The growing sophistication of the consultants' clients and their increasing
savvyness about when and which consultants they want to hire is a development that was already
triggered by previous recessions. New technological developments (digitalization) of course affect
the consulting industry, but they have always done so. Nevertheless, the consultancy sector finds
itself on the brink of a new beginning. The traditional management consulting business has
changed fundamentally.
In search for the real causes, one has to turn to the ones that buy consulting services: the clients.
The demand for consulting services has changed in important ways. What other driving force than
commercial benefits would make the global industry leader, McKinsey, invest as early mover in
business model innovations that could reshape the way the global consulting firm engages with
clients? For a long time McKinsey's value proposition, like the one of the two other mayor strategy
consultants - Boston Consulting Group und Bain, has been high-value strategy services to the most
prestigous companies in the world, judgment-based and forward-looking answers to the most
prevalent questions of top executives based on bespoke diagnoses, analytical skills,
methodological rigor and functional expertise. Today, the share of work that is classic strategy has
been steadily decreasing and is now about 20% of its original volume.
It's not that client organizations do not need any strategies anymore. But client organizations
become less dependent on consultants (i.e. they are able to do a lot of the work which the have
hired consultants before by themselves) and more savvy (i.e. they do not buy the traditional
management consulting services – delivered by a bunch of junior consultants, involving extensive
analyses and data gathering and based on opaque solution development processes – without
weighing a variety of factors in deciding whether the expensive services of a consulting firm made
sense). In addition, after decades of engaging consultants to conduct (the same) efficiency and cost
improvement programs based on proven methodologies and tools further potentials of
improvement are limited.
Implications of Consulting 4.0:

Client perceptions are reshaping the consulting industry, essentially pulling it into two distinct
markets: Low-cost consulting that is ultimatively about problems and solutions that clients
understand. Because they understand them, they know exactly what work is required; as a
consequence, they bring consultants in to fix those issues. The best buyers of consulting services
therefore focus their efforts on articulating precisely what’s required, so that no time, effort or
money is expended without cause («commodity" consulting). And high-value consulting that is
about situations when clients are less confident about the question and the work needed and that
is far closer to traditional management consulting and depends of the ability to think and act in a
creative and informed way about complex issues. In addition, recent developments in technology
have also contributed to the shift in clients' demand for consulting services. In various industries
new competitors with new disruptive business models are emerging based on these new
technological opportunities, undermining the competitive position of longtime incumbent leaders
and often causing the “flip” to a new basis of competition. Furthermore, technology-based data
collection and computer-based analyses spurring the ability to capture and store vast amounts of
data (e.g. about financial performance, client behavior, operational effectiveness of the supply
chain and production systems) allow to implement new solutions to further exploit the possibilities
of raising efficiency and effectiveness of operational processes. These new (digital) solutions are
deployed to optimize functional processes such as financial reporting, sales or maintenance
operations.