Published Articles

In a challenging economic environment, managing at both the general portfolio and operating-unit levels has taken on greater importance. Private equity firms and management teams must look at every possible avenue in order to streamline company operations and improve performance.

Doug Armstrong, Managing Director of West Monroe's Customer Solutions practice, says KNet is especially useful in boosting managers' productivity in the creation of product proposals. "Instead of spending 20 hours reinventing the wheel, the system enables our practice leaders to easily find proposals we created in the past that are very relevant to other client's projects. This frees them up to simultaneously wokr on several proposals that end up being higher in quality, increasing our chances of winning work."

***From the Credit Union Times, June 8, 2011***

A Chicago consulting firm, West Monroe Partners, has emerged as a key advisor on two of the credit union industry’s biggest mega-mergers, First Tech/Addison Avenue and now California’s proposed Kinecta/NuVision consolidation.

Roger Ballard, president/CEO of Kinecta FCU of Manhattan Beach, Calif. confirmed Tuesday it has hired West Monroe, with experience in handling merger integration in a number of industries ranging from healthcare and telecommunications to utilities and co-ops, to consult on its merger with NuVision FCU of Huntington Beach, Calif. to form a $4.7 billion entity.

Michael Buhrfiend and Emily Retzer of West Monroe Partners discuss Integration as it relates to customer relations and business development.  They say that "Integrating varied and vast amounts of information is vital to firms needing to maintain relationships with clients - and draw in new clients.  Decentralized data could mean hidden or lost data that firms should be using to become more visable and indispensible."

Are your employees reaching their full potential? Engineered labor standards are the key to a labor management approach that is fair to both employees and the company.

Manufacturers increasingly are passing on higher commodity and product prices, while restaurant operators, responding to consumer demands, are adjusting their buying habits in favor of lower-priced food items. At the same time, foodservice distributors face increased competition from new and stronger distribution organizations.

In recent months, the issue of the reliability and scalability of our nation's electrical grid infrastructure has risen to the forefront of our social and political agendas. As a society we have become increasingly aware that our electrical grid, as it is currently set up, is dangerously close to reaching its maximum limitations. Many inherent risks associated with relying on a 20th-century power infrastructure exist while operating in a 21st-century economy. It seems counterintuitive that a society such as ours, that places such a premium on technological innovation, has not invested more attention or dollars to update our mission-critical electric grid.

According to the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, employees aged 20–24 comprise 3.3% of the utilities industry workforce, while the same age range comprises 9.6% of all industry workforces—almost triple the amount of fresh college graduates as utilities. Similarly, employees aged 25–34 represented within the utilities industry workforce compared to all industry workforces is 15.5% to 21.5%, respectively.