Strategy, Competitiveness, and Growth

SMA’s Management Consulting Practice provides market and competitive strategy, innovation building, capability evaluation and development, competitive assessment and price to win, and strategy analytics. We have a track record of impactful engagements based on:

A powerful network of senior advisors that provide detailed and nuanced insights into customers, stakeholders, competitors, programs and technologies

Skilled consultants with access to a wide range of resources and tools

Proven robust methodologies to extract meaning from data

Close collaboration with clients to share learnings, teach approaches, and co-create actionable findings and recommendations

The Practice focuses on the front part of the program lifecycle:

Management Consulting Solutions

Innovation

Strategy and capability building using established frameworks to develop a sustainable competitive advantage.

Market Analysis

A validated pipeline based on insights into customer priorities, budgets, and timelines, and competitor capabilities.

Prospective Lessons Learned (PL2)™

Understand acquisition strategy now, rather than when you lose.

Competitive Assessment and Price-to-Win (CA/PTW)

Understand your competitive position.

CA/PTW Assessment

Start the journey to improve your internal processes.

Making Winning Choices™

Efficient development of robust win strategies for dynamic procurements.

International

Insider perspectives on acquisition process and key stakeholders to execute a winning strategy.

Contract Responsibilities

Detailed analysis of requirements to create a single integrated list of actual responsibilities.

Case Studies

In an engagement for the DoD CIO and supported by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, we revisited the governance structure for the Global Positioning System. Given the large non-military user base, and diverging needs of commercial and DoD users, we investigated alternate structures to allow a demand-based marketplace to drive future requirements with commercial funding. Study developed alternatives that balanced DoD equities and Congressional funding with new civil capabilities supported by a commercial business model. Findings were briefed to OSD, USAF, DSB and COCOM leaders.

Based on commercial market impacts on the space launch industry, the Air Force Undersecretary and NRO Director was concerned about DoD’s assured access to space. We were engaged to deconstruct the business models of the two contractors providing launch services to understand the magnitude of investment made, the robustness of their combined DoD and commercial businesses, and scenarios that would impact their ability and desire to continue launching national security satellites for DoD/NRO. The analysis assisted USecAF/DNRO in his negotiations with the two contractors, and precipitated the formation of the United Launch Alliance joint venture as a stable launch services provider to ensure assured access to space.

An $8B business unit of a major defense contractor needed to improve its efficiency and effectiveness as its business evolved and DoD budgets were projected to flatten. Focusing on overhead costs, we used multiple approaches to assess the organizational structure and activity focus to identify gaps between actual expenditures and where value is created. Recognizing the inherent difficulty in assessing each individual activity, we decomposed overhead spending into “asset classes” to determine where spending was out of line with benchmarks and corporate strategy. Result was a comprehensive set of recommendations around organizational redesign and budget reallocations.