Centric’s SAA Practice Is the Right Partner to Get You to ‘Next’

Discover how Centric’s Strategy Architecture and Alignment practice helps companies navigate complex business transformations by aligning strategic intent, designing tailored operating models, and guiding clients through sustainable growth and change.

In brief:

What’s the toughest strategic challenge Centric’s clients face?: Many of our clients are mid-sized companies whose growth has outpaced their systems. What worked before won’t work next, and the band-aids are starting to come off.

How do you help those clients succeed?: We start by identifying strategic intent — the “big picture” they are working toward — and then we engage the client in building the right operating model to reach their goals.

Can’t you design and implement a new model all at once?: No, because you only have two hands. However, prioritizing quick wins while mapping the long-term journey can help.

How do you ensure transformation success?: We tailor our team resources for each client and engage the client’s teams alongside our own to seamlessly implement our solutions and prepare the client for future success.

Businesses have many options for achieving growth and transformation.

They may choose to invest more in research and development (R&D) to develop new products and services. Or, they may expand their geographic footprint by opening more brick-and-mortar locations. Software companies may achieve growth through licensing changes. Still others may target mergers, acquisitions or divestitures.

But no matter the method, one fact remains: Business transformation is incredibly complex.

“We typically work with mid-sized firms that have grown faster than their systems, and they’ve hit a point where they have to change,” said Centric Strategy Architecture and Alignment (SAA) Lead Darren Rehrer. “What’s worked for them before won’t work for them next. They ask, ‘How do we transition successfully to the other side?’”

For Rehrer and his team, the challenge those clients present is like a jigsaw puzzle. To achieve the big picture, they must assemble variables like changing market demands, evolving customer needs, organizational capabilities, processes, technology, people, and governance in the right way.

“We are systems thinkers who can see all the puzzle pieces and use them to build a road map for solving complex problems to move them from where they are to where they want to be,” added SAA Senior Manager Jo Gilmore. “We help them plot the course and guide them through it.

However, sometimes the team’s challenge is even greater, because clients may not know what their business puzzle should look like when finished. In those cases, it’s like putting the puzzle together with the pieces upside down and no picture for reference.

Meet the SAA Team

We talked to Rehrer, Gilmore, SAA Senior Manager Stacia Geib, and SAA Strategist Colin McGee to discover how they are the right team to provide the vision and strategy needed to solve any business transformation puzzle.

Each member of Centric’s SAA practice brings deep experience to their work. In the early 1990s, while still a college student, Rehrer led a transformation initiative for agricultural sciences company FMC and developed a European voltage converter sold by Brookstone. He built on those experiences to complete improvement and transformation projects at International Paper, Hammer and Champy, Computer Sciences Corporation, and others before joining Centric.

Gilmore’s background includes a combination of hands-on strategy and product development work from divisions of large companies before a 17-year tenure at FedEx, where she learned to manage portfolios and the people responsible for them. Like Rehrer, Geib has consumer electronics experience and has helped companies save hundreds of millions of dollars.

Said Rehrer, “There’s never one single answer. Usually, it’s a combination of multiple solutions that have to fit together seamlessly. Our team has the variety of skills and experiences needed to do that.”

We Focus on Team Building

At the highest level, SAA is about aligning organizational design and business outcomes. A typical engagement begins with enterprise-level discovery, continues with vision and strategy development, and concludes with designing and implementing a new operating model.

“We start by meeting with senior VPs or C-suite executives to discuss big, broad questions,” Geib said. “Where do you want to start? What do you want to get out of this? Are you trying to paint the big picture for everyone, or do you need help defining what that picture is?”

The SAA team will then adjust its approach depending on the clients’ needs. If the client isn’t sure of their end state, Centric can lead with more visionary strategic thinkers, such as Colin McGee.

“One way I help is by bringing the discussion back to the client’s market,” McGee says. “Often clients need a better understanding of their local markets, how they relate to larger markets, and where those markets are headed. We will help those clients future-proof themselves.”

Another of McGee’s strategies is to help clients focus on four critical business areas: products and services, operations, organizational structure, and technology.

“Those four areas cover most companies’ reasons for seeking transformation,” McGee continues. “Usually, one of those areas is a catalyst for change because it is making the other three areas weaker. For example, not having the right products and services might come from an organizational problem of not having the right skills in the right areas, which leads to an overabundance of operational processes and overinvestment in technology.”

Other team members will use their synthesis skills to examine other problems in the company and spot patterns that prevent the organization from moving forward. The SAA team will also integrate with the client’s teams and can use Centric’s expertise in other areas to help.

“If we see a gap in Microsoft technology, we can tap those Centric resources. Most projects also require change management, so we often call on our People and Change team. And, our EPPM team can set up the tools and data needed to track teams’ success,” Rehrer said. “Our goal is always to assemble a team of client-centric resources to put the puzzle together seamlessly.”

As the picture becomes clearer, the team will shift to strategy. Continuing the puzzle analogy, some puzzles are easier to solve if you start with the edges first, while others are easier if you start with a big object in the middle.

In many cases, you can assemble the puzzle more quickly if you assign people to work on different parts in parallel paths. Then the challenge becomes coordination and communication among teams to bring the partially assembled sections together. Or, you may decide to set some pieces aside until you can determine how they fit into the big picture.

Either way, designing new business processes and operating models is similar to solving that jigsaw puzzle.

“The key is to ensure you’re all working together on the same puzzle,” Gilmore said.

Our SAA Process in Microcosm: Mergers and Acquisitions

Though merger and acquisition (M&A) work is a relatively small part of the SAA team’s portfolio, its complexity makes it a good illustration of the team’s approach.

Each M&A deal involves several phases, from due diligence to close. Centric can help with them all, but they deliver the most value during implementation and beyond, where most M&A consultants’ M&A work ends.

“About half of all M&A projects fail at the later stages of design and implementation,” Gilmore said. “People fail to recognize that they are no longer working on one ‘picture,’ but two. How do you get those companies to work together toward a common goal?”

In addition, customer expectations about M&A transactions have shifted. Previously, an acquiring company may have just closed its target, eliminating employees and forcing customers to switch to the new, bigger company. Today’s customers dislike that approach.

“You have to account for people first,” Gilmore said. “Merging organizations face big questions about how to avoid duplication of efforts and work more efficiently while treating both employees and customers well.”

“Then, you must decide the structure of the two organizations. Do you want to ‘ringfence’ the acquired company or integrate it — and if so, how?” Gilmore continued. “Next come questions of whether to keep overlapping technologies or to remove them, and the cultural change that comes with those choices.”

Elements of these issues recur throughout the team’s engagements. They all require coordinating multiple stakeholders, managing competing priorities, and communicating effectively across organizational levels. However, the team must overcome some logistical challenges to put all the right pieces in place.

For example, in all engagements, finding time on busy executives’ calendars is difficult.

“We constantly balance our work with the client’s other priorities, and we adjust our approach and materials to make them digestible for senior teams,” Geib said.

However, because the team doesn’t work only with executives, it must also tailor its communications for other groups. Executives need their information in two to three PowerPoint slides, but other levels of the organization will need more context and other channels.

“Our goal is to thread the right key messages throughout our communications, even if the level of detail or channels vary,” Geib added. “We share variations of the same messages to meet each audience in the right way.”

Despite the challenges, the SAA team is committed to seamlessly helping clients from start to finish, from planning and strategy to business architecture and implementation.

“There’s never one single answer,” Rehrer said. “It’s usually a combination of multiple solutions that you have to fit together with the client to help them get to their ‘next.’”

The Right Team, Right Puzzles, Right Solutions

Strategic business transformations are complex, but our SAA team’s “puzzle-solving” mindset delivers the right solutions. Their systems thinking, focus on strategic intent, and careful orchestration of internal and external resources have proven successful across industries and company sizes.

Rather than delivering generic frameworks, the team integrates with its client teams to identify the big picture, understands all the pieces and how they fit together, and assembles the right teams to complete the “puzzle” most effectively.

For organizations ready to move from their current reality to their next chapter, this team provides both the strategic vision and practical roadmap to get there.

Whether you’re embarking on a transformation journey or optimizing operations, our Strategy Alignment and Architecture experts can guide you with capability modeling and design, process architecture, organization design and role definition, shared services strategy and design, and technology and enterprise architecture. Get Started