3 Useful Analysis Tools For Reengineering Management Consulting Cases

3 Useful Analysis Tools For Reengineering Management Consulting Cases

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In any of the Big 3 consulting firms (McKinsey, Booz, and Bain) management consulting interviews, case study is the most important and difficult part.

It is totally flexible and has no fixed answers. Case study is formidable for yet another reason: there are too many types of cases to practice and countless tools you should know before taking the interview. This means you should not only have a good knowledge of what you learned at business school, but also should walk through all kinds of prevailing interview cases before recruitment season comes.

An often tested type of case is BPR, aka, Business Process Reengineering, which requires candidates to first identify problematic business processes and redesign them for higher productivity and efficiency. In the following part, we will introduce 3 useful consulting tools that can help you ace BPR cases in consultant interviews.

Work Flow Analysis

Work Flow Analysis is the first step for Business Process Reengineering: you have to find out defects of current business flow for improvement in next steps. Workflow analysis looks at the sequence of business activities and analyses effectiveness of it. The workflow analysis mainly looks into 5 sections: document management system, workflow processes, security and permissions requirements, workflow challenges and opportunities and business integration status. Design a summary sheet for scoring according to specific situations and check if all sections are functioning well. If there are problems (of course there should be), you will find ways to solve them in next steps.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is widely used in a variety of management consulting interviews and generally in work as management consultant. In the first step, you identified problems and in this step, you will find what best practices are. According to the Wikipedia definition, Benchmarking is the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries. That means you can find better practices by comparing with top performers. To perform benchmarking on interview site, you have to be extremely familiar with noted best practices. This is the prerequisite for any management consulting interviews. Depending on the specific case you are facing, develop unique matrix for measuring. One thing though is common for all benchmarking process in case interviews: explore and explanation why these practices are advantageous over current ones.

The concept of benchmarking can also be applied for different industries. For example, business practicing in banking industry can adopt best practices in insurance industry. Across industry benchmarking is workable because there are common best practices applicable to a range of industries and can be measured with the same parameters.

Process Mapping

Mapping a new business process is the ultimate goal of BPR as well as the last step for this kind of case interviews. Process mapping requires large quantities of symbols and charts to give a clear cut illustration. Generally speaking, there are two mapping methods: picturing flowcharts and table flowcharts. Picturing flowcharts mainly use graphics like circles, rectangles arrows and diamonds etc to draw a visual process which can be fairly complicated. Table flowcharts use tables (like the ones in MS Word) to illustrate 2 dimension relationships across multiple elements.

Process mapping is the fundamental part you let interviewers know your presenting skills. It is the ultimate outcome of the case study. When preparing for you management consulting interview, you should be aware of how to use work flow analysis, benchmarking and process mapping.


About the Author:
If you want more tips on how to prepare for consulting interviews, then download a free guide: ConsultingFact.com offers guides for resumes, cover letters, case interviews, case frameworks, and other material that will help you land a consulting job. Visit at: http://www.consultingfact.com



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