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Strategy and operations

Strategy to help you perform. Operations to help you execute.

Coming up against barriers to growth is inevitable.

Demographic shifts and a shrinking labor market are making hiring, retaining and training new talent more challenging than ever. Technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, leaving organizations facing new investments and implementations to stay competitive. And an uncertain economy means organizations need to find new, innovative ways to take the costs out of their processes.

To successfully overcome these barriers and achieve sustainable growth, your organization needs to be able to identify the root causes of your biggest challenges and deploy the right strategies. But gaining a big-picture view of your organization is difficult when you and your staff are already overburdened with day-to-day operations.

High-performing organizations not only have a clear vision for the future they also have the culture, alignment, leadership and accountability they need to achieve it. They look for innovative solutions and connect them to outcomes — and they know when they need to engage outside help to fill in gaps in capacity and capability.

Wipfli can help you start your journey to operational excellence by looking at your current state and helping you develop a strategy to reach your desired future state. We offer a broad range of proven methodologies and tools so that we can help you find the right, proven solution for your unique situation.

With our strategy and operations services, you get a plan that matches your objectives and guidance for executing it effectively.

Why Wipfli?

At Wipfli, we don’t just understand your pain points — we’ve lived them. Our team of professionals brings a depth of industry and executive leadership experience along with a full range of strategy facilitation and process improvement skills, data and analytics capabilities and change management experience.

Combined with our hands-on approach, we can provide proven solutions that help you achieve results. We believe perspective changes everything, so we look at challenges from all angles — strategic, operational, digital, people and cultural — to fully help you implement change within your organization.

We also know that strategy and optimization are continual processes, so our support and guidance don’t end after deployment. Our people continue to work with you, evaluating your progress and helping you restrategize as needed.

We’re ready to help you become a high-performing, future-ready organization by helping you ensure your strategy is aligned with continual performance management and that you have the right systems, people and processes in place to succeed.

Our services include: 

Strategy

At its most effective, strategy isn’t just a one-time event — it’s a way of being.

Traditional planning methods rely on stability and predictability, which are increasingly rare in today’s environment. The current marketplace means that traditional methods may leave you with unachieved goals and waste in both resources and opportunities.

Wipfli can help you build a strategy that meets your unique needs and focuses on keeping your organization future-ready. With our services, you don’t just get strategy — you get holistic alignment to help ensure that your organization is unified in realizing your priorities and achieving greater stability.

Wipfli’s team of dedicated facilitators brings deep industry experience to advising your organization on best practices and overcoming the challenges that are preventing you from reaching your future objectives.

We focus on helping your organization prepare for the future by identifying your strategic priorities and finding the gaps that are preventing you from reaching your objectives. We then take a tailored approach, working with your organization to build a deep understanding of your needs and applying a methodology that fits your most critical concerns.

Our strategic planning services offer your organization three levels of support:

  • Transactional planning: Sustain your performance by finding new ways to increase efficiency, eliminate waste and improve how you use your assets.
  • Forecasted transformational planning: We analyze your performance and compare it to shifts in your organization to better understand the gaps you need to address. From there, we help you develop a plan to meet your organization’s future needs, including organization and process changes and infrastructure improvements.
  • Revolutionary transformational planning: We help you redefine and regenerate your organization’s advantage. Whether you need new lines of business or delivery models, we can help you innovate and transform your organization to better suit your vision of the future.

We can also support your organization with people plans and strategy and technology alignment to help ensure that your human capital and systems are aligned with your objectives. In developing your strategy, we can help you facilitate:

  • Human-centered design discussions.
  • Custom survey administration.
  • Stakeholder or community needs assessments.

Wipfli’s strategy services don’t end with a paper plan. Our support follows you throughout your journey, helping you implement strategy effectively and master the culture of your organization.

Our services include:

  • Journey mapping: Our customer, member and technology mapping services can help you understand your strategy through the lens of those you serve.
  • Enterprise risk management: We help you assess and minimize the potential risks associated with your plan.
  • Implementation: We align your people, technology, culture and operations so that you can achieve a successful strategy implementation.

 

Wipfli’s digital advisory team applies holistic ideation and planning to help your organization transform with technology. We work closely with you to understand and accelerate your vision with the right technology strategy. Whether you’re looking to reinvent your organization or have a road map for incremental improvement, our seasoned practitioners help ensure that every area of your organization receives targeted guidance.

We help you use technology to bring your vision to life through four essential components:

  1. Human-centered planning and ideation: Through collaborative conversations, such as Design Thinking workshops, our advisors help you envision what your organization can become and craft a strategy to achieve your goals.
  2. Technology initiative assessment and readiness benchmarking: Our team helps you blend technology with your mission and vision, guiding you through the software selection process so that you can maximize your ROI.
  3. CIO advisory: We provide interim, partial, consultative and mentoring services for the CIO role to help shape your organization’s digital strategy at the executive level. Our range of services can be tailored to your level of need, whether you want situation-specific guidance, fractional resources to augment your team or coaching to help your leadership reach their full potential.
  4. Program management: Wipfli specializes in orchestrating multiple technology initiatives, combining both internal and external resources to achieve strategic business outcomes. Our services start by assessing your current practices and providing you with actionable recommendations for improvements. We then help you build a robust program management office tailored to your needs and coordinate multiple projects within your program.

Operations

With vast experience helping achieve operational excellence, Wipfli’s professionals bring valuable insight to help your organization solve its most pressing challenges and thrive well into the future.

We can help your organization with:

Wipfli’s process improvement services can help you optimize your operations and find new ways to reduce costs. We work closely with your team to find the root cause of issues, create a defined plan and align your team around changes.

Our services include:

Traditional process improvement:  Using value stream mapping and root cause analysis tools, our process improvement team can map process steps, identify process waste, define future state options and action plan the steps to get you there.

Lean process improvement: Wipfli can help your organization identify ways to eliminate or reduce waste in your processes so that you can focus on bringing value to your customers.   

Automation: Wipfli can help your organization improve performance and start doing more with less by identifying opportunities for automation. We support you through establishing requirements, development and testing so that you can deliver automation that helps you achieve your goals.

Documentation: Our team helps you get in-depth details about how your organization works, helping you review and document your business processes and identify how you can optimize them.

Job costing: Empower your organization to grow with Wipfli’s job cost optimization and advisory services. We analyze your business activities — including personalized guidance on your current processes — and tailor our recommendations to your specific needs.

Wipfli can provide support for your organization during any stage of the software selection process, from requirements gathering to contract execution.

Our team seeks to understand your organization as deeply as you do, carefully evaluating potential software so that you get the value your organization deserves.

We can support your organization with the following:

  • Requirements-gathering workshops.
  • Demonstrations, including provider demo scripts and demo scorecards, so that you can stay focused on high-priority functionality and clearly understand how software can meet your needs during vendor presentations.
  • Provider due diligence.
  • Statement of work review and execution.

Let Wipfli help your organization minimize the disruption of a major implementation. We can guide your organization through change, helping you transform with:

  • New software and technology: Help ensure a smooth transition and high adoption rate with Wipfli. We help you build a strategy that supports employees, provides effective training, addresses potential resistance and clearly communicates about the new benefits and changes. 
  • Mergers and acquisitions: Wipfli can help you maximize the success of your integration with services to help your organization navigate complexities and minimize disruptions.
  • Procedural and organizational culture: Our team works closely with your organization to engage stakeholders and be proactive with communication so that you can successfully implement new processes, procedures and organizational culture shifts.

Project management

Wipfli offers project management services to help you ensure you achieve the highest success rate for your investments. Our team helps provide support in all areas of your implementation, including:

  • Communication
  • Critical tasks and task prioritization
  • Budgeting
  • Alignment

Business advisory services

Working at the intersection of your business and software vendors, we help you identify the key processes, data and decision points that are pivotal to your success while offering industry knowledge, experience and guidance around best practices and system design.

CLIENT SUCCESS STORY

How we helped one manufacturer overcome internal conflict to quadruple their growth.

See their story
Our perspective drives growth

For more than 90 years, Wipfli has used our unique perspective to deliver practical yet transformational solutions to our clients. Our integrated approach helps mitigate risk, optimize performance and accelerate growth.