Our Latest Thinking on Cost Excellence

Companies can use a category-specific analysis to identify the best alternatives to conventional sourcing strategies.

In our most recent report, total shareholder return fell dramatically across the industry, rising only in emerging economies and a few product categories. Is this a temporary shock or a new normal?

Five actions for the C-suite to tackle their cost challenges.

Most company efforts to reduce expenses fail. Four challenges block the way: two reflecting what costs get cut, and two related to how value is delivered.

Rethinking organization design does more than eliminate unnecessary expenses. It aligns decisions and resources with strategic goals, and promotes sustained performance.

When organizations connect cost management initiatives to their purpose, vision, and values, their transformation efforts are more likely to be successful and sustainable.

Having an emotionally strong workforce makes it likelier that organization-wide changes will succeed. Cultivating it means helping people fulfill four fundamental human needs.

Reaching a higher, value-adding level of support function maturity isn’t a distant vision but a tangible goal that can be achieved with purposeful action.

Too often, IT projects fail to live up to their hype. Why does it keep happening—and how can it be fixed?

Making IT a core element of a cost initiative allows the organization to optimize operations, reduce spending, improve service delivery, and enhance competitiveness and efficiency.

By optimizing technology costs, sourcing, and management, businesses can thrive amid disruption. Here’s how the most resilient companies do it.

Companies have reinvented their business models, IT architecture, and ways of working. So why are they taking an outdated—and largely unsuccessful—approach to ERP?

To thrive during turbulent economic times, health systems can learn from the aviation industry, which embraced novel diversification approaches to maintain revenue stability and improve profitability.

Telcos’ five-year performance record in terms of total shareholder return and value creation is below average—but an analysis of the top-ranked players shows how companies can overcome the industry’s challenges.

New capabilities put retailers in a position to leverage AI and generative AI to obtain a clear picture of what a product should cost and how its suppliers stack up.

Demand is solidifying for products that use biological processes and genetically modified microorganisms in place of traditional production methods. But for change to happen, costs must come down.