
Operations Consultation, also called operations management, is defined as advisory and application services that enhance a company’s internal operations and performance in the value chain. Operations management consulting projects create more productive client operations by advising on and supporting changes to the target operating model, functional business processes, management systems, culture, and other components of the value chain.
The market for operations consulting and management services comprises eight components:
- Organizational Operations
- Sales & Marketing
- Supply Chain
- Sourcing & Acquisition
- Finance
- Business Process Management
- Research & Development
- Outsourcing


Various aspects of the components
Organizational Operations aims at enhancing the performance of all aspects that support the organization’s structure, including organization design, governance (across functions and departments), roles and responsibilities, and employee performance.
- Supply Chain Management (SCM) consultants organize a business’s supply-side activities across the full value chain, ranging from production to logistics (inbound/outbound) and warehousing to customer delivery.
- Sourcing & Acquisition looks at all acquisition activities to find, evaluate, and engage suppliers for obtaining goods and services.
- Services equipped at the Finance department focus on a range of financial activities. More strategic contribution includes mergers & acquisitions, capital budgeting and asset management.
- Implementation services aim to improve the performance of one or a group of financial processes, such as order to cash, procure to pay, cash management, working capital and the financial closing- and reporting process.

It focuses on improving operational performance by enhancing a company's business processes – it is also described as process management and/or process improvement. The BPM landscape consists of several elements, such as business process design, defining the 'to-be' situation and modelling process flow and activities to support the blueprint.
This service area is all about the business side of innovation. Consultants are engaged to develop and enhance the bottom-line of innovation spend, which ranges from optimizing new product development (NPD) processes to uplifting portfolio complexity management and improving the efficiency of the R&D organization.
Consultants typically assist clients with designing and building outsourcing blueprints – mainly for back-office processes such as finance & accounting, HR and recruitment, legal, IT infrastructure and applications – and afterwards support the transitions.