Executive Summary

• There are a lot of companies to choose from when it comes to inventory management consulting.
• We cover the essential considerations. 

Introduction

The inventory management or inventory management consulting space is filled with companies that very much focus on illusory or trendy items rather than the basics that impact improving inventory management. We cover one company, Accenture, and how misleading the information on their website is on inventory management consulting. 

Accenture’s Supply Chain Consulting

These screenshots were taken from Accenture’s website. 

Accenture discusses many things that aren’t directly related to inventory management. 

All of Accenture’s website pages on its consulting offering are like this. Everything is about “transformation” or “turning process friction into flow.”

When we drill down, we are taken to more high-level coverage. Why is Accenture so disinterested in discussing or presenting specifics around inventory management consulting on their website? 

Accenture Tips Its Financial Bias

This is Accenture’s comment on systems. 

Accenture’s Procurement function is transforming to deliver value above and beyond what is expected of traditional procurement. We’ve shifted our focus past the traditional role of managing transactional compliance to also becoming a partner to our business functions, enabling Accenture’s bottom line. It’s the reason we changed our name to Procurement Plus several years ago.

Our systems landscape is SAP® Ariba® On Demand and a single global instance of SAP S/4HANA®. Our journey involves standardizing, simplifying and automating the elements of traditional procurement by digitizing processes, moving to a frictionless buying experience and developing analytics to enable intelligent procurement supported by data-driven decisions. – Accenture

For all clients? Accenture has an extensive SAP practice where they make large amounts of money, so they will likely try to push SAP S/4HANA on their clients. However, Ariba is far better for indirect procurement (buying small things for consumption and not generating revenue) than indirect procurement. 

This means that Accenture’s inventory management consulting comes with a high financial bias where Accenture will want to push SAP systems on companies that reach out to them. 

The quote from Accenture continues. 

In working toward these goals for our mature and digitized procure-to-pay (P2P) process, our Procurement Plus team realized that despite running single global system instances, workflow variances existed between regions, categories and spend levels across processes.

Attempting to understand those variances was difficult—not knowing where to look, how, why, and what was different. Conversations with teams that influenced the differences often became subjective and emotional. Driving change this way was time consuming and problematic, so we looked for a better approach. – Accenture

So much of what Accenture writes is just throw-away paragraphs. But again, notice the lack of discussion around actual inventory management consulting topics. 

Speaking in Concrete and Specific Terms About Supply Chain Consulting

We think it’s essential to speak in concrete and specific terms about what is being offered.

For example, here is our description of our safety stock calculation. 

The Problem with Safety Stock Calculation

What was laid out above is the principle, but the standard safety stock formula is unusable? No studies demonstrate that the dynamic safety stock formula is used in companies — even though it continues to be taught and is frequently discussed. Yet, safety stock cannot rationally be calculated in isolation from other factors in the inventory management.

How is it nearly always calculated (when it is calculated at all)? That is right, in isolation for each product location. 

Our Solution

Having found the problems with safety stock management consistent over decades of reviewing supply planning systems, we developed a modification to the standard safety stock formula that works much better. However, calculating a safety stock for a product location in isolation of all the other product locations makes no sense. – Brightwork Research

We cover the details of one of the essential parts of SCM, which is safety stock. This explains that we disagree with standard safety stock formulas and have made adjustments to them in the software we created. 

Our Approach and Verification Capability

The type of information published by Accenture is not what we find useful, which means the consulting company is very comfortable beating around the bush and making things up rather than addressing core issues. 

We have strong knowledge of SCM and have written a number books and many articles on these topics. We can verify the skills and knowledge of any inventory management consulting firm and therefore support inventory management consulting firm selection.  

Our Independence

• One of the most important questions that you should have is regarding our independence from the influence of software vendors. And here, we rate exceptionally well. We have no relationships with any vendors or any other third parties.
• Unlike virtually all consulting firms like Deloitte, Accenture, or Infosys, or IT research entities like Gartner, Forrester, or IDC, Brightwork takes no money from any vendor.
• As an unbiased entity (for instance, that is not both selling consulting projects while also offering Consulting services) we can offer entirely unbiased advice.
• The problems with the lack of independence in the IT research space are covered in our article The Brightwork Research & Analysis Rating of IT Analysts Like Gartner, Forrester, and More.

Background on Our Primary Analyst

Our primary analyst is Shaun Snapp. However, we also bring in other experts that fit the needs of the support. However, Shaun Snapp writes the analysis, incorporating the specialists of this type if they are necessary.

• Shaun Snapp performs research for Brightwork Research & Analysis. Brightwork Research & Analysis covers many IT topics ranging from databases to open-source software.
• After many years as an implementation consultant, Shaun Snapp migrated to being a researcher. He usually works in project advisement and performing analysis for things like IT acquisitions and project planning.
• Brightwork Research & Analysis is known for publishing information around the enterprise software space that is not covered elsewhere.

Contact

To contact us for either our inventory management consulting or for helping selecting and verifying inventory management consulting firms, type your message into the chat bubble in the lower right-hand corner of this website.