Some companies (mainly those which actually produce physical stuff) may lack the knowledge for fairly elementary process optimization. That's the stuff they teach the upcoming consultants at school. And that's the stuff that actually saves everybody's money.

If that's all, we can simply add a couple Operations Research classes to ant engineering curriculum and we'd be done.

That’s not all, and that might be true, but that’s an example of how consultants in some cases do earn their pay. That being said, they generally don’t seem to.

That's how you sell the Board on a project. You know Jon from IT thinks this will save us a bunch of money.

versus

We engaged Deloitte and if we allocate $XXM on this project to using XYZ solution which is part of the "gartner magic quadrant" we can see a ROI of XX.

the point of a consultant is to get you money from who ever holds the purse stirngs.

It's often more to provide backup and justification for a decision. Even if it then goes wrong you can say "Deloitte told me to do it".

While this may be true, it still doesn't take away two strengths consultants can bring: - never underestimate the value an independent view can bring, especially to a big company suffering from group think - secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable.

> secondly, a common consulting practice is to re-sell successful projects to other clients. Obviously not the exact IP, but the experience and general approach. This can be invaluable.

This is basically our business model, combined with a B2B product that supports it. We have developed a very good recipe for a few clients and are now applying it everywhere.

Today, about 80% of our business is a consulting package. The 20% technology setup piece comes after we figure out how to conform the customer to our capabilities.

Yep, do a successful project, write a case study, and resell it to everyone.

"We here at [consulting inc] have previously implemented [solution] for [fortune 500] in [the same industry] and they experienced [big number]% increase in [metric] as a result."

I don't buy this argument at all. At the end of the day, consultant backed or not, you're responsible for the implementation. If it fails it's not on the consultants. They're long gone. And someone needs to carry the blame.

John from it has a job doing critical stuff. He’s not going to work 60 hrs a week polishing a PowerPoint presentation on why we need to do x to save 10million dollars. Even if you save that 10mil John probably doesn’t really care that much, it’s not his money.

Maybe if company politics outweigh objective facts!? Or you need someone to give you an independent perspective? For companies it can be like a bit of therapy…

In my experience, consultants are a good, easy CYA policy, as well as being able to look good for promotions and whatnot if you get the big names.

To be fair, CEOs are also kinda useless... on a more serious notes, these consultants are more like priests of capital, there to prosletize whatever new cargo-cult framework is popular (without actually making any real change mind you).

I kind of like some old consulting literature from the 70s and 80s,especially the cybernetics stuff, as it seems like it's genuinely scientific and trying to improve things. Just the quality of writing in i.e. "Brain of the Firm", is so much more complex and erudite than what you see coming out in the field now.