How a finance consultant helps create a pathway to a sustainable value chain
Summary
A value chain is concerned with creating value at every step of a company’s operation from designing its product or service to delivering and supporting its future in the marketplace.
It has quickly become a vital part of measuring a company’s competitive advantage and ability to not just survive but succeed in the cutthroat market.
Creating a sustainable value chain: Sustainability has been a goal for every core function of a business for several decades now, but it has risen in importance in more recent years. Any company looking to become an industry leader must also look towards hitting sustainability goals on all fronts.
This can be easier said than done in a market that is increasingly becoming more volatile. With the global landscape in flux, crises and challenges have become commonplace and securing antifragile functions and value chains becomes a more distant possibility.
The role of finance consulting in value chains: Finance has played a more prominent role in furthering value-added goals as priority is placed on how resources are invested and on furthering more sustainable ecosystems. This means that a sustainable value chain requires the support of financial best practices, and finance consultants have the power to create this value across industries.
With their knowledge of both region-specific outlooks and global best practices, financial consultants have the resources, networks, tools, and experience to create a strategic route to long-term value chain sustainability.
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For any contemporary business, getting ahead of the competition has been of utmost importance as the global economy continues to ride the wave of digital transformation and greater integration.
Over the years, and as transparency has become an expectation, the ways a business proceeds to garner this competitive advantage have been scrutinised more closely.
Customers and other stakeholders are paying attention to more than just bottom lines and profitability. More value-added factors have risen to the centre and become a noteworthy way a company’s true inclinations can be viewed in the market. This includes a company’s eco-consciousness, ethics, and ESG and CSR investments. It also encompasses the focus on adding value to each step of any function’s process. Or, in other words, how a firm secures a robust value chain.
The concept of a value chain was first introduced by Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter in his book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. In it, he discussed that a competitive advantage a company may have cannot be discerned by looking at a company as a whole. It must be gathered from the litany of separate actions that are performed in the process of ‘designing, producing, marketing, delivering, and supporting its product.’
A statement that ultimately says that value can only be located and boosted overall if every specific step in the chain of a company’s process is reinforced with greater value addition.
Creating a sustainable value chain
Sustainability, its importance, and how much weight a company must put behind ensuring that this quality is in place have risen in recent years as innovation makes it possible to set loftier goals for how sustainability is achieved.
It is no longer enough for a company to focus on injecting short-term value into their value chains in the hope of continuing value addition and more antifragile functions.
Any company looking to grow and establish itself as an industry leader and pioneer with an enviable market share is one that must also look towards sustainability on all fronts.
That includes the way in which the company value chain is sustained.
The biggest barrier to ensuring sustainability, however, has been the swift and decisive ways the global landscape has changed in recent years and months.
From the ebbs and flows of COVID-19 going from a global healthcare crisis and pandemic over two years to the rising economic crisis it was sure to bring, and more recently the war in Ukraine. The world is in tumult and globalisation has ensured that even localised challenges and crises will eventually impact the world at large.
Even as many companies have adjusted to the developing fallout from the global healthcare crisis, new challenges have come to take its place leaving it seemingly impossible to know what the right course of action should be for a business. What customer needs will a company need to be responsive to from day to day? Where should a company invest its resources and which functions will become the most necessary to a company’s success in the years, months, or even days to come?
Questions abound the current business landscape and there is hardly ever a straightforward answer to many of them. That is where the value of a financial consultant is clear.
The role of finance consulting in value chains
Business investment in sustainability and eco-conscious and more ethical values have never been higher than it is today.
The policies of nations, governments, and global governing bodies have started centering sustainable finance at their core, with the movement becoming larger than simply ESG priorities. Sustainable finance is growing into a brand new ecosystem altogether that is following on the heels of legacy investing and financial structures.
This means that companies are now aware that keeping sustainability at the forefront of every step in the value chain is the only way to ensure that company resources are allocated in such a way as to further more long-term goals.
That is why many companies across industries and countries have turned to the experience of a finance consultant to lead the way.
A finance consultant helps a company pave the way to a more sustainable finance strategy and value chain with the experience and insight they have about the best practices governing the industry. This means they take account of short and long-term goals a company has in place and create a strategic route towards achieving them without compromising financial outlooks or short-term survival during a crisis.
Leverage the support of a finance consultant
When it comes to creating a more antifragile financial future that promises integrated success for any company operating in the current volatile landscape, a finance consultant can be an invaluable strategic source.
With the resources they have at their disposal and the insights they are able to offer, companies that have the support of a financial consultant are more likely to achieve the coveted position of an industry pioneer.
