Cost Management
Many organizations fail to use a participatory process to cut costs which can harm the morale and vitality of an organization.
True North’s open systems approach examines the relationships and interdependencies of your business processes, products, people and their skill sets, culture, rewards, and information technology. Such an approach to cost reduction minimizes the risk of damaging core capabilities from across-the-board cuts.
We bring together a cross-functional group to identify processes that are redundant, unnecessarily complex or inefficient, as well as practices that waste money and hamper productivity.
We create a portfolio of cost-savings and operational improvements to identify the quick wins, the most promising initiatives, and the more complex and harder-to-realize opportunities. We also use portfolio management techniques to assess ongoing corporate initiatives and determine if they justify further investment based on strategic congruence, operational importance and likely ROI.
Risk Management
Realizing full business potential and protecting shareholder wealth requires top management’s oversight. Risk tolerance is too often assessed, compartmentally within each business segment. Aligning the strategic, financial and operating objectives of a business with an enterprise-level risk-management framework maximizes returns in line with specific risk-reward objectives.
Most business risks are categorized as strategic, market, credit, or operational, although categories such as regulatory, legal, liquidity, and reputation can be classified, depending on their significance. What are the key strategic risks your firm faces? How should these identified risks be managed? Are there major risks to the businesses of your strategic customers, suppliers, and alliance partners that could have a large ripple effect on your own business success? What changes need to be made to explicitly manage corporate longevity as well as the long-term survival and health of the enterprise?
True North helps our clients better understand the most critical areas of risk, what drives those risks, and the options to consider for managing them. We help firms establish processes and policies to better clarify and make smarter decisions to manage risk, furthering corporate longevity and survival. We also provide objective insight and advice, help develop a corporate resiliency strategy and plan, and help gain management alignment and buy-in to the plan.
True North helps clients define risks, set risk tolerance levels, establish policies and introduce methodologies to measure risks objectively on an ongoing basis. While the metrics for measuring a risk type have been built on scientific data which may be unique to each, there is increasing progress in developing uniform risk metrics so that the risk exposure of separate business segments can be aggregated. The appropriateness of uniform metrics can be determined for the particular business. We can assist with systems that establish and monitor macro-economic scenarios. We can also provide sophisticated risk analytics for investment and business portfolios.
Our Senior Advisers are experienced at guiding senior management teams to improve enterprise-wide risk management. We will provide candid feedback on a business’s existing risk management systems and risk management culture. Drawing from decades of past experiences, we work with our client’s business leaders to build and implement actionable programs that define, measure, and monitor risk. We help define the decision-making processes necessary to assume the risks to meet targeted returns outlined in the business strategy.