Car sales in India are going through the roof as the country continues to grow and prosper. More people with money means more goods and services and more cars to transport them. While prosperity is a welcome addition to the India economy, the impact on the environment is not. In fact, the environmental challenge raises some important questions: How can India minimize the environmental impact caused by the transportation sector without impacting the country's growth momentum? Which automotive technologies are environmentally friendly? How can Indian automakers sell "green" cars at a price that will suit cost-conscious Indian consumers?

To answer these questions, A.T. Kearney and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) conducted a joint study to identify and prioritize key actions for cost-effective green mobility. This report explores various options available to India to move toward a green mobility paradigm with lower carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) emissions—and therefore less impact on global warming—and lower emission of regulated pollutants such as particulate matter (PM), monoxides of nitrogen (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and unburned hydrocarbon (HC).

This report examines the opportunities available for a more cost-effective, greener mobility future for the consideration of all stakeholders: industry, government, and consumers.

Corporate compliance—or, more accurately, the risk of noncompliance—has become a major concern over the past decade, especially for global manufacturers with operations in many different countries and jurisdictions. When a practice commonly accepted in one country could be a serious criminal or civil offense in another, companies had better know about it.

Many firms understand that compliance can lead to competitive advantage and are making their suppliers commit to compliance standards that go far beyond those required by law.

To understand how companies reduce the risks of noncompliance, A.T. Kearney surveyed execu¬tives at leading manufacturers, conducting in-depth interviews with compliance executives at nearly 40 top companies worldwide. While most studies approach compliance from a legal perspective, we focus our attention on compliance management.

Five major findings emerged from our examination of compliance management in these areas:

• Most companies expect to expand their compliance systems.
• Lower management has a much less favorable perception of compliance systems than top management, indicating a strong need for administrative efforts to generate acceptance at all levels.
• Most companies do not have an independent compliance department that reports directly to the executive board.
• External resources are especially useful for setting up a compliance system.
• The most effective compliance systems integrate compliance and process management.

Today, CEOs and supply chain executives continue to ask important questions:

• How do we control mounting complexity?
• How can we balance size and efficiency with flexibility and responsiveness?
• Is it possible to plan for demand volatility?
• Which of the many companies in our supply chains should be our closest and most trusted partners?

Answering these questions requires taking a closer look at the pressures on today's supply chains, the different improvement measures available, and the reasons why companies often fail to take the appropriate measures.

Executives know they need to improve their supply chain performance and that simply cutting costs and improving service is no longer a viable option. Yet those who move beyond the basics to take the larger leap of seeking transformative change often fall short. There are several reasons why:

• After picking the low-hanging fruit, what's next?
• Benchmarking is analogous to goal setting.
• Trouble getting past unfulfilled promises.
• Measuring beyond cost and service.

Next, supply chain objectives must be closely aligned to overall business objectives, especially if the goal is to gain competitive advantage. At this level, it is important that your supply chain capabilities can carry you into the future.

Once you are looking beyond cost and service and including "new" capabilities among your strategic targets, the result is increased and growing competitive advantage.

Scattered pockets of natural gas off the coasts of South Africa and Mozambique were all that southern African countries seemed to offer in terms of oil and gas resources. That changed in 2010 and 2011, when a potential 500 trillion cubic feet of gas was identified across Mozambique and South Africa, along with 11 billion barrels of oil in Namibia. Together, these countries’ gas reserves equal those of Canada or Venezuela. 

The discoveries present major opportunities for South Africa, Mozambique, and Namibia—from reducing the cost and carbon intensity of power generation to creating a supply of chemical feedstock to drive manufacturing development. Chemical companies have the most to win from the exploitation of gas in the region. With a looming worldwide oversupply of chemical capacity, only regions with a source of local, low-cost feedstock will stay competitive. Southern African gas offers that opportunity. 

This paper examines some of the economics of oil and gas in the region, considers their possible impact, and offers recommendations for handling these resources. 

Despite all the talk about shale gas development—the potential environmental consequences of hydraulic fracturing, the potential to replace coal with gas for generating electricity, the potential for the United States to export liquefied natural gas (LNG)—none of it addresses the bigger picture: The market is structurally out of balance, and it can’t stay this way. The technological triumph of shale gas has led to production that far outstrips demand, and if this were a normal market, price and demand shifts would have already delivered a quick rebalancing.

But shale gas is not a normal market and a rebalancing is not likely in this complex ecosystem where a wide array of players have diverging incentives and investment horizons. Over the past 20 years, gas prices have fluctuated between $2 and $15 per million BTU. At the low end, the producers are not viable, and at the high end, users of gas cannot afford to use it. Will we face more years of such fluctuations before achieving balance, especially since numerous decisions affecting that balance are still up in the air? And yet, bets must be placed now. Infrastructure must be built. With fortunes to be made or lost, these decisions must be as informed as possible. 

Before the onset of the economic downturn in 2008, a perfect storm of factors had pushed capital spending to new heights. At the same time, global markets were offering ample, readily available funding in global markets; competition for scarce resources spurred companies to act quickly.

The financial crisis of 2008 tightened capital markets and brought considerable uncertainty about long-term economic stability. For two years, capital investment activity dropped. In 2010, capital investments recovered and growth is expected for at least the next three years. Spurred by the push for new frontiers, companies are again investing heavily in capital projects. Capital spending is now $11 to $12 trillion annually, with growth of 10 percent or more expected in the next few years.

However, certain paradoxes are creating significant challenges for managers across the globe and posing major risks to project economics. According to A.T. Kearney's second Excellence in Capital Projects study—or ExCap II—capital project performance remains well below par, with three out of five over budget, and seven out of 10 behind schedule.

This paper examines the study findings, discusses the challenges managers face in capital projects, and highlights the leading practices across the capital expenditure life cycle.

The landscape for upstream oil and gas companies is shifting at an unprecedented pace. The production of conventional sources of oil and gas is relocating to more remote, more difficult, and more expensive parts of the globe, such as ultra-deepwater, and to the Arctic. This inevitably leads to higher project costs and higher risk on capital returns.

Oil price volatility has also reached new highs. Crude oil went from $17 per barrel in 2001 to $105 in February 2012, with downward swings as sharp as five times, from $145 to $30 in 2008. And wholesale gas has had its own ups and downs. In the United Kingdom, for example, day-ahead gas prices were 15 pence per therm in July 2009, 77 pence per therm a year later, below 30 pence per therm a year after that, and trading around 60 pence per term in the beginning of 2012. On the continent, gas prices started decoupling from oil prices, creating uncertainty and negatively influencing both oil companies and their customers.

To preserve profitability in these challenging times, oil and gas companies must maintain operational efficiencies while minimizing risks. With this in mind, materials management is a hidden gold mine for many upstream companies—a wealth of value waiting to be discovered.

Natural gas markets have been in continual flux since deregulation, with increasing volatility for the past 10 years. In the early part of the 2000s, the U.S. natural gas supply was tightening in the face of growing demand. This supply-demand imbalance, created by clean energy pressure, drove price increases from the traditional $2 to $3 MMBTU (million metric British thermal units) floor to more than $13 MMBTU in 2006 at the Henry Hub, a central U.S. trading point for wholesale gas. Then came the widespread use of unconventional drilling and completion techniques, namely horizontal drilling coupled with multistage hydraulic fracturing, which opened up untapped expanses of shale formation across the East, the Midwest, and beyond. This boom in the U.S. gas supply has kicked off a dramatic expansion in production capacity in North America and exploratory efforts around the globe.

The resulting gas glut has been a boon for users, while drillers struggle to understand the developing end-game scenarios and economics. George Blitz, vice president of energy and climate change at Dow Chemical, said in recent testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, "When natural gas prices are low relative to oil, U.S. chemical manufacturers have a competitive advantage."