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Marketing - project
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In September 1999, the Ukrainian Association of Management Consultants (UAMC), launched a Management Consulting Services Survey. The purpose of this survey was to define the awareness and general perception of the Ukrainian market towards management consulting services and their main providers in Ukraine. This initiative was supported by PricewaterhouseCoopers Management Consulting Services, one of the founders and active members of UAMC.
The survey was conducted in the form of face-to-face interviews with the top management of some 300 major multinational and local companies in Ukraine. Ukrainian Marketing Group (UMG), one of the leading Ukrainian market research companies, was commissioned to perform the interviews.
We believe that this UAMC initiative serves as a good indicator of the development of the management consulting market in Ukraine. It not only helps the market participants raise awareness as to the range of services available in the market, but also to improve the quality of the services provided by management consultants by helping them focus more on client needs.
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Management
Consulting Services Survey
In
September 1999, the Ukrainian Association of Management Consultants (UAMC) and
PricewaterhouseCoopers launched Management Consulting Services Survey. The
purpose of the survey was to define the awareness and attitude of Ukrainian
market towards management consulting services and their main providers in
Ukraine. During the period from September to December 1999 Ukrainian Marketing
Group, commissioned to conduct the survey, held face-to-face interviews with
heads and top managers of nearly 200 multinational companies operating in
Ukraine. Brief summary of main findings is presented below.
Perception
of Management Consulting Services.
Under
this section participants were suggested to choose from the list those services
that could be referred to as core management consulting services, and this part
of the survey revealed rather interesting understanding of management
consulting. As you can see from the Chart
1, Strategic Planning and Management
Information Systems are most often perceived as core management consulting
services. Curiously enough, Tax Advice
took the third place and was closely followed by Legal
Advice and Market Research,
whereas only one third of respondents named such traditional management
consulting service as Cost Reduction. Among
all respondents 13% did not name any relevant service.
Chart
1
Attitude
towards Management Consultants
The survey showed that the overall attitude towards management
consultants is favourable:
·
19.3% claimed that management consultants were
absolutely necessary,
·
24.7% considered them useful,
·
45.8% said that they could be useful sometimes
·
3.6% felt that Consultants were a waste of money
·
1.2% suggested that Ukraine was not ready for
this type of professional services.
More
than half of the respondents were in agreement that management consultants could
definitely add value to their businesses here in Ukraine, while 20% felt that
they definitely could not add value at all and 28% believed that consultants
could not add value at that stage of their business. Among the main reasons for
the negative answers were availability of their sufficient internal company
resources and small size of the business.
Chart 2
Engagement
of Management Consultants
Chart
2
demonstrates how often it is expedient for respondents to engage external help
to solve internal problems. Among those respondents who felt positive about
Management Consultants, almost 59% believe that management problems can be more
efficiently resolved with external help from time to time, 19% think that
external help is needed often, and the remaining respondents claimed they can
efficiently cope with such problems on their own.
The main areas where such external help is needed were named as Business
Process Improvement (55.9%), Strategic
Planning (30.7%) and Information
Systems/Technology (30.7%). Current management concerns
that received maximum priority are System
Controls (39.8%), Human Resources
(30.1%) and Information Technology
(24.1%).
Chart
3
32.5%
respondents (Chart 3) have never
worked with management consultants and only 14.5% respondents have been engaging
management consultants on a regular basis. The main criteria used when selecting
management consulting firm were named as:
·
Reputation (61.4%),
·
Price (54.8%),
·
Local Staff and Experience
in Ukraine (52.4%),
·
Expertise (45.2%),
·
Corporate Guidelines (34.3%).
When asked to name leading Management Consulting companies in Ukraine, more than
half of respondents found it difficult to answer, whereas several respondents
named companies that specialize in tax and legal advice only. Those who answered
this question ranked the companies as follows:
|
Company Name
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Ranking
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%
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PricewaterhouseCoopers
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1
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35.5
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Arthur Andersen
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2
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19.3
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Ernst & Young
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3
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12.7
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KPMG
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4
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12.7
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Deloitte & Touche
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5
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11.4
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Conclusion
As
we can see from the survey results, Ukrainian management consulting market is
still far from being mature. Large proportion of business managers do not have
clear understanding of who management consultants are and what they do, which
generally reflects low level of market awareness about such services. On the
positive note, most respondents agree that often it is necessary to engage
external help in order to solve internal problems/issues more efficiently and
that management consultants do add value to their businesses. All the
above-mentioned factors make us believe that there is great potential for
development and growth of management consulting market in Ukraine, as well as
there is still much work to be done, and if such growth is achieved, this will
contribute to prosperity of both our clients and the Ukrainian economy as a
whole.
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