External articles

Want to Improve Your Social Media Reputation? Better Learn to Understand It First
23 January 2012 — Chain Store Age
In a new study, A. T. Kearney and ListenLogic have looked at the impact of social media on retail customer service. Our results suggest that most businesses have a long way to go before they can even understand their current social media presence — let alone understand how to use that information.
by Jim Singer and Mark Langsfeld
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The Risks in Remote Locations
January/February 2012 — Supply Chain Management Review
Supply chains in remote locations present major costs, challenges, and risks and have a significant impact on project strategy, specifications, profitability—and, ultimately, investment decisions.
By Wim Plaizier, Michael McCool, and Guillaume Cretenot
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Crystal Ball 2012
13 December 2011 — Connected Planet
Once again Alex Liu identifies trends and predictions that are likely to have the biggest impact in the new year for the communications and high tech industry.
By Alex Liu
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Mature Consumers: What Drug Chains Need to Know
21 November — Chain Drug Review
Adapting to the radically different requirements of mature consumers can have extensive consequences for retailers. As this customer group grows and gains purchasing power, smart companies will adjust their strategies accordingly to gain a competitive advantage.
By Martin Walker and Bob O'Meara
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Stop the Roller Coaster — A Smarter Approach to Apparel Sourcing
16 November 2011 — ApparelStrategist.com
There is no silver-bullet solution for today’s tough sourcing problems. But there are smart steps retailers can take to prepare for—and respond to—the market’s changing landscape.
By Sanjay Srikanth, Esteban Bowles, Chris Callieri, Deepa Neary
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Influence of Demographic Changes on Corporate Strategy
31 October 2011 — CNBC Africa
While the world grapples with the meaning of ever increasing populations, much continues to influence how the world will meet its challenges. Paul Laudicina, managing officer and chairman of the board, of A.T. Kearney joins ABN’s Godfrey Mutizwa to discuss the sociopolitical and demographic changes in the world and their influence on corporate strategy and on Africa specifically.
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How to Run a Should-Cost Review
24 October 2011 — DefenseNews
The U.S. Defense Department is experiencing unprecedented cost pressures as demands to reduce government spending rise, and should-cost review is becoming the tool of choice to improve affordability.
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How Government—And Contractors—Can Do More with Less
3 October 2011 — AOL Government
Reducing costs. Reducing spending. Reducing debt. This familiar language, which the private sector uses when times get tough, is becoming increasingly familiar to governments worldwide. And the message is clear: Business as usual will no longer be tolerated.
By Bob Willen, Randy Garber, Erik Peterson and Charles Hughes
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The Wireless Battle for Small Business Customers
19 September 2011 — Connected Planet
Though all major U.S. carriers have begun to intensify and revamp their tactical efforts, the battle for small business customers is far from over.
By Reuben Chaudhury, Alicia Covaleda and Roi Ross
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Time to Tell Your CPOs to Collaborate with Suppliers
September 2011 — Industry Week
Today, reducing costs is no longer enough. Companies want value and they want their chief procurement officers (CPOs) to deliver it. How can CPOs get the job done? By first identifying and then collaborating with their key suppliers.
By Mike Hales, Oliver Zeranski and Hendrik Disteldorf
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The Latest Hype, or a Real Opportunity: Is Mobile the New Great Hope for Pharma?
5 September 2001 — pharmaphorum
One of the biggest stories around is mobile health, and pharma companies are well placed to realize value. A.T. Kearney has identified three key success factors for mobile health service, plus several plays that pharma needs to consider.
By Michael Thomas and Jonathan Anscombe
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Rough Ride Ahead
September 2011 — CSCMP’s Supply Chain Quarterly
Carriers and shippers will need to work together to navigate challenges such as high fuel costs, driver shortages, and tight capacity.
By Michael Zimmerman
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A Cloudy Forecast for Air Freight
September 2011 — CSCMP’s Supply Chain Quarterly
Air carriers enjoyed a strong recovery in 2010 and early 2011. But oil price volatility and a looming supply/demand imbalance mean there could be some rate turbulence in the next year or two.
By Josh Brogan
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Outsourced Call Centers: Friend or Foe?
13 July 2011 — Connected Planet
Companies need to pull back and let call center suppliers run their businesses while ensuring that suppliers deliver high-quality service.
By Alex Liu, Rashid Ahmed and Raghu Viswanathan
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P&C Insurers Must Move to a Customer-Centric Operating Model
24 June 2011 — www.insurancetech.com
To capture the full benefits of a changing environment, insurers must create customer-focused models that shift away from their traditional channel or product focus. It's a daunting task, but A.T. Kearney's Joseph Reifel discusses several simple ways for insurers to succeed.
By Joseph Reifel
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Cross-Industry Project Management Practices
May/June 2011 — Renewable Energy World
The ability to manage new construction projects on budget and on time is a critical factor in determining the cost competitiveness of renewable energy. In particular, the ability to manage the technology supply market and source generation capacity at the lowest total cost of ownership is becoming a key differentiator.
By Kish Khemani, Neal Walters, and Patrick Haischer
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Health Insurers: The Customer Engagement Imperative
22 April 2011 — Insurance & Technology
Insurers now have a great opportunity to take the lead in reforming healthcare delivery by harnessing market forces to curb costs without sacrificing quality—to succeed, the health insurance industry must take five proactive steps to better engage with its customers.
By Mike Hales, Joe Reifel, Paul Schroeder, Adam Pressman
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Procurement Outsourcing: How to effectively navigate the risks to reap the rewards
28 January 2011 — Sourcing Interest Group (SIG)
Only a handful of companies are considered experts at outsourcing procurement and, to date, most procurement outsourcing is limited to select portions of indirect spend. It is difficult to envision it expanding to all indirect spend areas across companies, let alone into direct spend. Expectations that procurement outsourcing will achieve high growth over the next several years may need to be tamped down.
By Christine Ahn, Rodrigo Slelatt and Ricardo Ruiz-Huidobro
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Crystal Ball 2011
23 December 2010 — Connected Planet
This third annual Crystal Ball perspective reviews last year's predictions and looks ahead at 2011 and further industry turmoil in the tech and telecom sector.
By Alex Liu
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Manage Risk in a World of Wild Cards
22 November - 5 December 2010 — ICIS Chemical Business
Successful companies are improving their risk management capabilities to address supply threats posed by unforeseen risks.
By Kish Khemani, Andy Walberer and Oliver Zeranski
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Improving Construction Cost and Schedule Performance Through Risk-based Estimating and Contracting
December 2010 — Nuclear Power International
While some degree of cost and schedule uncertainty is inevitable with highly complex, multi-year projects that deploy new technology, the question becomes how can the industry predict financial and schedule impacts of these uncertainties and employ mitigation strategies to limit their impact.
By Kish Khemani, Neal Walters and John Wolff
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Open Source Readiness: Is Your Company at Risk?
2 December 2010 — Connected Planet
Open Source software is being adopted across all areas of the enterprise and service provider IT stacks. However, most decision makers are unaware of this adoption and its impact on their organization.
By David Brown, Sid Dayal, Andrew Williams
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Farming Out Pharma
November / December 2010 — CHaINA
Over the last few years, China's pharmaceutical industry has been booming, due in large part to strategic moves and sourcing strategies of Western pharmaceutical companies seeking low cost manufacturing.
By Vishal Bhandari, Axel Erhard, Saurabh Tejwani, Mike Wise
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Building Nuclear on Time and on Budget
November / December — Electric Perspectives
Budget and schedule performance is critical to the business case for new nuclear capacity.
By Kish Khemani and Neal Walters
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Sourcing Success Under Tight Time Pressure
November 2010 — Supply Chain Management Review
Guidelines can help supply management professionals "do the right thing" and "do things right" in a hectic, time-pressured environment.
By Chris Ahn, Ricardo Ruiz-Huidobro, Kumar Venkataraman, Michael Hu
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Keeping and Eye on Software Asset Management
November 2010 — Supply Chain Management Review
Because the potential to use cloud computing for business-critical applications remains limited, decisions regarding demand and consumption of software assets must still be made internally and managed effectively.
By Jan Stenger, Venkat Tummalapalli, Michael Roemer
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New Kids on the Block
September / October 2010 — Renewable Energy World
A.T. Kearney offers a strategic rationale and emerging business models for utility-scale investment in distributed, renewable energy technologies.
By Jochen Hauff, Patrick Haischer, and Kish Khemani
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Corporate IT Innovation Is Where The Money Isn't
22 October 2010 — Forbes
In theory, IT innovation is important—yet it's often not a priority in company budgets. Adapted from "Where the Money Isn't," Summer 2010, MIT Sloan Management Review.
By Bob Haas and Christian Hagen
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Study on Achieving Excellence in Retail Operations
20 October 1020 — Chain Store Age
A.T. Kearney recently executed the Achieving Excellence in Retail Operations (AERO) study, with 53 leading retailers, to provide insight into how retailers can improve their retail operations.
By Dean Hillier
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Will China Lose Its Cost-Competitiveness in Pharma Manufacturing by 2015?
September 2010 — Life Science Leader
With macro trends impacting China's pharmaceutical manufacturing, Western companies have a range of options to stay cost-competitive, but the solution will need to be aligned with the company's strategy, supply chain capabilities, and product / supplier portfolio — and the solutions have varying degrees of reward and implementation complexity.
By Axel Erhard, Vishal Bhandari, and Saurabh Tejwani
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A Focused Journey to Achieve Carbon Neutrality
25 August 2010 — SupplyChainBrain
The expertise and experience of the sustainability practice guided the development of the internal carbon-reduction program, and at the same time the rigor of the internal analysis and resulting innovations provided insights for clients’ sustainability programs.
By Mike Wise
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Rebalancing Quality Priorities
18 August 2010 — IndustryWeek.com
To reenergize their quality focus, companies should manage quality as a customer experience, address quality issues with sophisticated risk management approaches, and transform the quality function to become a source of strategic value.
By Jaochim Ebert, Vijay Natarajan, Andrew Newsom, David Qu
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Indirectly Accountable
July 2010 — CPO Agenda
Indirect procurement may be shrugging off its “paper clips and printer paper” reputation, but are organizations managing these spend categories to their full potential?
By Simon Rycraft and Jan-Fokke van den Bosch
[Read Article] — From the contents page, click on “report from A.T. Kearney”

Rethinking IT Application Outsourcing Contracts
July/August 2010 — Supply Chain Management Review
With IT application development and maintenance outsourcers fighting to hang on to business, now is the perfect time to revisit outsourcing contracts.
By Bob Haas, Arjun Sethi and Venkat Tummalapalli
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To Boost Sales, Stock a Little of Everything
Q2 2010 — Supply Chain Quarterly
The answer to the problem of low-volume SKUs may seem counterintuitive, but experience shows benefits from stocking small quantities of every product at every store and centralizing replenishment decisions.
By Laurent Chevreux
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The End of Outsourcing (As We Know It)
10 August 2010 — Bloomberg Businessweek
Who will emerge as the new leaders? Google and Amazon.com, brands that we associate with search and retail, will become better know for outsourcing.
By Arjun Sethi and Olivier Aries
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New neighbors, new threats — an all-cloud mobile future?
11 August 2010 — Connected Planet Online
The battle continues: Device manufacturers, Web services players and traditional telcos are expanding their product and services footprint to occupy key customer control points.
By Bernhard Kickenweiz
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Getting from Here to There - How railroads can save our highways from gridlock
Second Quarter 2010 — The Milken Institute Review
In the search for ways to increase the productivity of surface transportation, some of the lowest-hanging fruit is getting short shrift -- we estimate that every $1 invested in the intermodal transportation network would yield $5 to $8 of benefits in terms of less congestion, reduced shipping costs, and fewer traffic injuries.
By Randy Garber and Amiya Setu
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Is there a cloud at the end of the telco pipe?
5 April 2010 — Connected Planet Online
For all the talk of telcos trying to get a higher share of chief information officers’ wallets, there is little to show in one of the hottest recent trends: software as a service or cloud computing.
By Augusto Morais
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Oil-Sands Lessons
April 2010 — Oil and Gas Investor
Improving the design and execution of large oil-sands capital projects could significantly reduce life-cycle costs, and research provides seven keys for managers of smaller projects.
By Neal Walters, Vance Scott, and Hakan Civi
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How to Unlock $43 Billion in Value by Improving Working Capital Management
April 2010 — PharmaPro
Raising the average working capital performance level of pharmaceutical companies to that of the industry’s top quartile would result in freeing up $43B of cash — money which could be productively invested in research, marketing and other value generating initiatives.
By Carol Cruickshank, David Hanfland, Paul Inglis, Shiv Shivaraman
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Globalization enters a new era: What course will it take?
March/April 2010 — Corporate Finance Review
Globalization is entering a new era and it will take collective, purposeful policies to ensure it continues.
By Paul Laudicina
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Driving Growth through Ultra-Low-Cost Product Development
17 February 2010 — Industry Week
For emerging and developed markets, ultra-low-cost products are here to stay and offer rich rewards for companies that follow 10 imperatives for success.
By Joachim Ebert, Shiv Shivaraman, and Paul Carrannanto
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Supplier Carbon Management
11 February 2010 — Procurement Leaders
Having worked closely with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) on a detailed study, A.T. Kearney offers several pointers on how to drive carbon reduction through supplier relations — from better training to supplier dumping and improved metrics.
By Stephen Easton and Daniel Mahler
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iCPO, We’ve Got an App for That!
January/February 2010 — Supply Chain Management Review
A future where most of your coworkers reside not in the next cubicle over, but across the corporate campus, in another city, state or even the other side of the globe. Far from being the exception, this is the new normal.
By Carrie Ericson, Hugo Evans and Joe Raudabaugh
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Oil at the Crossroads
January 2010 — Oil and Gas Investor
The energy industry faces an unprecedented confluence of challenges. The combined efforts of IOCs, NOCs and OSCs provide the best path to a sustainable future.
By Vance Scott, Neal Walters, Brent Ross and Prakash Chandrasekar
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Crystal Ball 2.0: Crazy Ideas for 2010
14 December 2009 — Telephony Online
Alex Liu, A.T. Kearney partner and lead for Americas Communications & High Tech, reviews the results of his 2009 predictions and makes a few new ones for 2010, commenting that "The future is getting less cloudy."
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Brazil — A Country of Regeneration
September 2009 — Inside Supply Management
Brazil is positioning itself as a near-shore alternative for organizations that are re-evaluating global sourcing strategies.
By Ricardo Ruiz-Huidobro and Markus Stricker
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The Customer Care Revolution
3 August 2009 - destinationCRM.com
A real revolution is taking place in CRM, mainly because customer care is central to creating a revenue moat around customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.
By Sid Dayal
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Time to Renegotiate Those 'Mega' IT Deals?
July/August 2009 — Financial Executive
As the global economy slows down and financial executives move to trim costs and improve efficiency, the IT mega deal is ripe for renegotiation.
By Bob Haas, Jonathan Zanger and Juan Llanos
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The Real Storm Is Yet to Come, Can Wireless Turn the Tide?
11 May 2009 — Telephony Online
Bad news and good news — scenario planning will help wireless carriers get ready to take more bold action so they are prepared for the real storm that is approaching.
By Bernhard Kickenweiz
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Some Thoughts about how to Survive the Retail Crisis
12 January 2009 — Mass Market Retailers
Retailers who successfully act on basic tenets will improve their survival chances, strengthen their companies, and position them to take full advantage of the cyclical upturn when it returns.
By Esteban Bowles, Sanjay Srikanth and Anthony Romano (recent EVP and chief supply chain officer at Ann Taylor Stores Corp.)
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Making a key decision in a downturn: Go on the offensive or be defensive?
January/February 2009 — Ivey Business Journal
In an economic downturn, decision-making is distilled in to a clear-cut choice: Do you go on the offensive, aggressively pursuing growth, or do you become defensive, protecting your revenues and profit margins?
By Graeme K. Deans, Chaitan Kansal and Steve Mehltretter
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