In today’s media and entertainment climate disruption is not the new normal—it’s simply normal. Content consumers are firmly in the driver’s seat—demanding more choice, personalization and interactivity. At the same time, despite a growing number of ways to reach your audience, engaging them has never been more challenging. Behind it all, digital technologies are continually redefining how entertainment and media products are produced, distributed, consumed, and monetized.

We can help you break through the noise and achieve a sustainable competitive edge. We work with your peers, including each of the global diversified media and entertainment companies, the top 5 B2B information companies, 8 of the 11 leading publishing companies, many of the top global streaming services across both video and audio, and a number of large global video game companies. We’re also on the front lines of sports and location-based entertainment (LBE), having completed 170 projects in this rapidly growing market. As established leaders in customer loyalty—and experts in the sports industry—we’re well positioned to improve fandoms and optimize connections in the ecosystem of fans, athletes, teams, and brands.    

More broadly, our deep media and entertainment consulting expertise will help you sharpen your D2C strategy, identify growth opportunities, achieve deeper customer engagement, and support your M&A strategy—whether your goal is to anticipate and meet customer demand, tap the full value of your data assets, seize a leadership position in the rapidly evolving media ecosystem, or gain a leg up in the rapidly growing eSports market.

Our media and entertainment consulting expertise, combined with a robust set of proprietary tools, can help you:

• Transform your cost structure to meet the change in monetization needs
•  Integrate your acquisitions in the highest ROI methods
• Identify the most efficient marketing promo mix
• Increase content monetization through our Content Optimization product
•  Optimize D2C marketing mix to increase customer acquisition and retention at a lower cost
•  Enhance the customer experience using data from NPS Prism®
• Access real-time competitive intelligence and data on marketing effectiveness, measurement and attribution with Mensio, a Bain Media Lab product suite launched in partnership with AI company Hive
• Help you adjust your operating model to support transformative growth.

In an industry where today’s breakthroughs will soon seem as antiquated as rabbit-ears antennae, you need a strategy that enables you to be the disruptor, not the disrupted. Our media and entertainment consulting expertise equips you with the data, insights, and tools you need to anticipate what’s next, pivot when needed, and transform at speed.

Rapidly evolving market dynamics, regulatory forces and consumer expectations are continually adding new layers of complexity to the healthcare industry. Our healthcare and life sciences consulting expertise is built on a detailed understanding of each player across the value chain, from doctors and patients to payers, drug developers and manufacturers. Our cross-disciplinary insights can help you fuel innovation, reduce costs, optimize digital technologies and achieve maximum, sustained value. We operate as one practice, with expertise across Pharmaceuticals, Medical Technology, Healthcare Payers, and Healthcare Providers and Services, bringing diverse and deep experience to every engagement.

Pharma

From R&D to supply chain and operations to every facet of commercialization, pharmaceuticals and biotech companies have to execute flawlessly across all dimensions if they hope to win.

Medical Technology

Innovative devices and products, integrated platforms, and digitally powered selling and service models are rapidly altering the MedTech landscape. We can help you chart the right strategy and execute it flawlessly.

Healthcare Payers

We can help you improve share in flat-growth markets; build and buy into new, high-growth markets; improve your Medical Loss Ratio; deploy analytics to derive powerful insights from your data; improve member experiences; and turbo-charge automation.

Healthcare Providers and Services

Cost pressures and the global impact of healthcare reform are just two of many challenges facing healthcare providers today. To gain and maintain a winning position you need the right strategy, supported by a carefully tailored operating model and a mastery of change management.

Downturns, lockdowns, trade wars and, for some, a dawning era of massive infrastructure investment add up to a moment of extraordinary change and opportunity for the construction and building products industry. Soaring construction costs have stressed both commercial and residential subsectors and their related supply chains. Yesterday’s playbook is out, and adaptability is in.

For decades we’ve helped industry leaders develop the strategies and capabilities that fuel innovation and growth. In more than 1,700 engagements, and every type of market environment, our consultants have helped companies in materials, services, wholesale, distribution, and other segments achieve extraordinary results.

As sustainability becomes imperative, we’re helping our clients reinvent the way they operate, invest, and plan. Whether you’re a manufacturer and distributor of building and construction materials seeking to understand usage trends and market penetration, or an engineering and procurement company specializing in highway and street construction, our skilled teams will help your company achieve unprecedented impact.

Our global network of experts can help you accelerate digital innovation, transform cost structures, reinvent your manufacturing capabilities, and bring more resilience to your supply chains and procurement programs. The industry’s most successful companies have turned to us for commercial due diligence on many of the past decade’s biggest projects, and we are also the acknowledged leader in post-merger integration. Our clients are leaders in the use of sustainable building materials, like green steel.

As world populations rapidly alter how and where they work, travel, and live, profound changes are coming to the sector. Only the boldest, most disciplined, and innovative companies will prosper. We’ll ensure that you’re among them.

Across every subsector of aerospace and defense—including commercial aerospace, defense, space, and government services—we help leaders solve their most challenging problems and emerge stronger than ever. Our aerospace and defense consulting expertise has enabled clients around the globe to pursue digital transformation, sustainability, operational excellence, and cost containment.

Whether you’re seeking manufacturing improvements powered by robotics and AI, strategic advice on transitioning to the cloud, or a way to boost resiliency amid supply-chain disruptions, our experts will collaborate with you to build new capabilities and seize hidden opportunities. We also provide crucial advice in post-merger integrations, separations, and divestitures, and we are the unquestioned industry leader in providing due diligence for scores of private equity and corporate clients.

As the commercial aerospace industry rebounds from the historic downturn of 2020-21, new challenges are on the horizon. Companies need to innovate to meet new sustainability agendas. Many have yet to develop adequate strategies for developments that could change the future of flight. Emerging technologies and partnerships demand diverse portfolios, which can be enabled by organic innovation, acquisition, and joint ventures. 

Backed by our extensive network of industry and functional experts, we help you transform cost structures, improve performance, and build new commercial partnerships with next-generation technology companies. Critical to all of these efforts is winning the war for talent, which is becoming a scarcer resource than capital. We’ll show you how to attract, retain, and develop the high performers who will take your company to new heights.

Waves of industry disruption make this an ideal time for A&D companies and their investors to develop and implement strategies to maintain their leadership positions. Let us show you how to navigate today’s turbulence and make your organization more innovative, agile, and sustainable.

Commercial Aerospace

The global pandemic has posed a profound stress test for every corner of the commercial aerospace industry. As a new normal takes shape, we’re helping our clients redesign their operating models, navigate consolidation, and meet ambitious sustainability imperatives. Our clients include virtually every major aircraft and engine manufacturer, component creator, commercial transport company, maker of jet propulsion systems, and dozens of key suppliers and service providers.

Defense

We understand the seismic forces reshaping business for defense contractors today. Amid extraordinary budgetary pressures, new entrants are emerging around the globe as corporate consolidation continues across the industry. While capital is sometimes abundant, finding and harnessing the right talent is harder than ever. To thrive, established companies must become more agile, getting products to market faster than ever—customers increasingly expect this and at a lower cost. We can help you adapt to these trends with a proven track record built on successful engagements with virtually every A&D prime and dozens of Tier I/II suppliers.

Space

Lower launch costs, smaller satellites, reusable rockets: the “space race” has evolved from a battle of superpowers to an increasingly accessible business proposition. As commercial aerospace companies redefine the market and as huge investments flow from venture capitalists, the barriers to entry are falling in once unthinkable ways. This creates profound opportunities for companies involved with spacecraft launches, mission control, and services for geostationary and lower-earth orbit products. But it also means intense competition. We can help you thrive in this brave new frontier.

Government services

For decades, we have helped the world’s largest and most successful government contractors improve performance and deliver new service levels. We can help you modernize IT systems, control costs, and recruit top talent. Our global footprint and wide-ranging expertise give us a deep understanding of what it takes to win in a sector characterized by rapidly evolving market dynamics, shifting regulations, and new competitors.

The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic will be felt across the aviation and airline industries for years to come. But even as company leaders map their recovery strategies, other trends are already beginning to reshape the industry and will remain dominant forces for the next two decades. Our aviation and airline consulting expertise can help you anticipate, respond to, and ultimately convert these challenges into opportunities.

• Sustainable consumption: Sustainability is now the next digital, as shifts in customer behavior and governmental and political interventions require companies to make the right moves on alternative fuels, carbon offsets, stakeholder sentiment, and other aspects of sustainability.
• Digital Intimacy: Big Data and advanced analytics make it possible to provide hyper-personalized buying and in-flight experiences as you treat each customer as a “segment of one.”
• Network disruptors: Numerous innovations, from electrification and supersonic flights to autonomous vehicles and augmented/virtual reality, are redefining the capacities, costs and experience of transit.
• Automation: The era of the “automatic airline” is upon us, as biometrics, robotic-enabled ground operations, and a variety of back-office innovations increase efficiency, speed, service and safety—and require that companies rethink their talent strategies.
• Market Redefinition: The net effect of so many market and technology trends, geopolitical forces and factors influencing channel disintermediation is that new competitors and businesses can drain existing profit pools and create new ones. We can serve as your trusted advisor to help ensure you achieve and maintain a winning position.

Our battle-tested playbook can help you thrive amid these and other disruptions. We address all key sources of value, including your operating model, revenue drivers, labor and non-labor costs and activities, network and fleet restructuring, and all facets of business transformation.

The automotive industry is experiencing profound disruption as five critical trends (see our analysis of the “5 RACES”) promise to reshape not just the industry, but society. To succeed, companies will need to decide which of these trends to differentiate themselves on, and which to address through a range of partnerships—possibly even with competitors.

Companies can no longer focus only on traditional value chain activities. Instead, they must pursue a comprehensive business system transformation that puts a renewed focus on customers, invests in the right digital technologies, and rethinks every aspect of the organization, from the C-suite to the factory floor. 

In this environment, our automotive consulting experts work closely with vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, technology companies, and mobility service providers to develop breakthrough strategies that help you achieve the full potential of your business today while ensuring that every facet of your business is future-ready and poised to seize new opportunities.

One thing is certain about the recent turbulence in the global chemical industry: it won’t stop anytime soon. To lead, your company needs to be agile and resilient. You need an advisor with experience and resources. Whether you’re contemplating a merger or a digital transformation, or simply want to reduce costs and improve performance, our teams can guide you to a winning strategy.

For decades, we have shown leading companies how to innovate, adapt, and reach their full potential. In more than 1,500 chemical consulting engagements we’ve applied our expertise across a vast range of market segments. We’ve worked in every major subsector, including petrochemicals, organic and inorganic base chemicals, polymers and plastics, specialty and performance chemicals, agrochemicals, fine chemicals, and industrial biochemicals and biomaterials.

We’ll ensure that your entire organization is aligned on a tailored, powerful strategy that gets results, today and well into the future. From supply chain to procurement, we’ll help you reimagine your operations in a way that incorporates the latest digital tools, the unique composition of your organization, and the constantly changing nature of the global chemicals business.

Our multidisciplinary teams help companies shift their asset portfolios, overhaul their cost structures, or prepare a new chemical plant for a successful launch. We understand that offering superior products to your customers is just the beginning; we can help you build the kind of sales capabilities that put the right offers in front of the right customers at the right price and time, in the most effective channels.

Today’s macroeconomic environment is dynamic. Across sectors, supply and demand in flux, due in part to shifting pressures from customers, governments, and investors. No company can afford to stand still. Industry leaders are rethinking their footprints and operating models, exploring new markets, and taking steps to address highly variable demand.

Let us show you how you to meet the challenges of the present and seize the brightest future for your company.

Consumer goods companies have been dealing with turbulence and disruption for years, but not like this. A global pandemic, massive shifts in consumer behavior, supply chain shocks, and competition from new players are just some of the factors putting the brakes on growth. An intense focus on sustainability has consumers and companies at every stage of the value chain rethinking their habits, priorities and ways of doing business.

Despite those pressures, the list of leading CP companies has remained remarkably stable, a testament to the advantages of scale. By reshaping their portfolios, revamping their go-to-market models and pursuing operational efficiencies, scale leaders have managed to remain on top—for now.

Our consumer products consulting expertise ensures you stay there. As agility and consumer intimacy become ever more critical, we'll help you navigate disruption, anticipate risks and remain an industry leader. We can help you:

•    Develop a deeper understanding of your consumers to shape your business outcomes today and in the future
•    Develop a winning strategy using Bain Radar 360 Strategy®: Adopt a “today-forward/future-back” approach that enables you to reach full potential with today's business as you make rapid progress toward your future vision.
•    Accelerate brand growth, even in slow-growth categories in developed markets, using our Brand Accelerator
•    Become a true partner with retailers, managing key accounts more effectively than ever
•    Turn your supply chains into competitive weapons
•    Unlock the power of your supply base from Procurement Full Potential efforts to drive margin expansion, meet your scope 3 and ESG targets, and drive resiliency & innovation
•    Reshape your brand portfolios through strategic mergers & acquisitions and divestitures, to achieve scale, tap into new growth areas or acquire new capabilities. We can help you optimize target selection, diligence, and value creation, supported by the right M&A strategy and integration expertise.
•    Simplify, speed up, and slim down operating models to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of your organization
•    Build sustainability into your strategy, so you transform it from a challenge to an opportunity.

Our clients include companies in food, beverages, personal and household care, consumer durables, luxury goods, apparel and shoes, recreational products, over-the-counter medicines, and other sectors. The breadth of our experience and expertise, combined with our broad ecosystem of best-of-breed partners, ensures that we tailor powerful solutions that meet your exact needs.

Consumer-led Brand Growth

A powerful, data-driven solution that puts consumers at the heart of your growth strategy. Discover how the Bain Brand Accelerator can help you break free from a category view of the world, refocus on consumers’ needs, grow and nurture brands through multi-year value creation plans, and much more.

Commercial Excellence

Navigate the tectonic shifts in retail to accelerate growth. We work with you across five distinct pillars of commercial excellence, to identify the true sources of value and deliver on them. We also help you transform your organizational operating model and enhance your technology capabilities to support your commercial excellence strategy.

Digitalization in Consumer Products

Become a digital performance leader by fusing technology, data and organizational design. We help hundreds of CPG companies develop best-in-class digital strategies that direct your investments to the priority initiatives that will generate the most value.

We provide deep experience across the oil & gas and utilities & renewables sectors to deliver operational excellence and fuel strategic growth.

Only by doing the hard things right do we make big things happen. In today’s hyper-competitive and rapidly changing global energy industry, success demands the right combination of strategic thinking, flawless performance, and an innovation mindset. As climate change and shifting consumer preferences redefine the business-social compact, we help our clients invest with an eye to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies.

For decades, our energy consultants have delivered breakthrough solutions for clients in every sector of the industry. We bring integrated expertise that cuts across regions, functions, and capabilities – from the latest in digital tools and analytics to deep insights in consumer trends and cost structures. Our energy and natural resources expertise covers everything from post-merger integration to supply-chain optimization, cost transformation, and B2B go-to-market strategies. We can help you discover new ways to improve every aspect of your operations, to redefine your markets, and scale your innovations.

We are committed to ambitious sustainability goals for our own firm, and we have a proven track record of helping companies harness the power of new technologies and practices to reduce their carbon footprint. We’ll help you work with customers and stakeholders to protect and expand your social license to operate in your communities. Our teams help utilities mitigate wildfire risks and natural gas companies move toward net-zero operations.

Energy and natural resources companies are under extraordinary pressure to be accountable to investors, regulators, and the public at large. Get the balance right and you can seize a once-in-generation chance to achieve breakthrough transformation. Get it wrong and you may face an existential crisis. You don’t have to do it alone. Let us show you how to make big things happen.

We work with companies across the full spectrum of financial services, including banking, payments, insurance, wealth and asset management, and capital markets. Our highly collaborative approach is designed to help you manage risks, reduce costs, innovate, boost customer loyalty, turn data and analytics into a competitive weapon, and achieve breakthrough digital transformations.

With deep experience across every sector of financial services, we work side-by-side with you and are fully invested in your success—we treat your business as if it were our own. We can help you develop clear, practical action plans and implement them efficiently, to ensure you achieve real and sustainable performance improvement. We have unmatched expertise across every strategic and operational area that financial services firms are currently focused on, augmented by a broad array of specialized capabilities, including:

All facets of M&A, including a systematic approach to post-merger integration that can unlock deal value beyond your expectations.

Emerging trends and opportunities in sustainability, to ensure you pursue pragmatic actions that generate strong ROI, an approach we also carry through to ESG investing.

Organizational enhancement and reinvention, including operating model redesign, the transformational power of the Agile enterprise, and a full suite of enterprise technology capabilities.

Customer loyalty and experience advances, supported by our Simple & Digital approach, customer episode redesign, NPS Prism® benchmarking service and NextEngine digital attacker.

A wide range of performance improvement disciplines, from zero-based budgeting to cost transformation.

Vector℠, our unique cross-capability approach to digital delivery, which combines our expertise in automation, enterprise technology, advanced analytics, digital innovation and related disciplines, augmented by a robust ecosystem of best-of-breed partners.

Deep expertise in risk and regulation, ensuring that you keep pace with a rapidly evolving landscape and maintain your competitive edge.

Banking

From commercial, private and retail banking clients to digital natives, digital attackers, fintechs and other disruptors, we help our clients achieve results today as they make the essential moves needed to win in the years ahead.

Insurance

Amid a digital revolution, insurance companies need to focus on agility and customer-centricity. We help insurers develop and execute strategies that increase profitability and efficiency, leverage digital capabilities, improve customer loyalty, and gain competitive advantage from advanced analytics.

Market Infrastructure

We work closely with stock exchanges, clearinghouses, fintechs, custody and security services, and payments infrastructure companies to ensure their operations are optimized to address the many value chain activities that support buy- and sell-side market participants.

Payments

We help card issuers, merchant acquirers, payment processors and card networks embrace the latest innovations, from real-time A2A and peer-to-peer payments to distributed ledger technology, so they can improve service, lower costs and keep pace with the rapidly evolving payments market.

Wealth and Asset Management

Wealth, asset management, and private banking institutions need to be at the top of their game to satisfy the expectations of a sophisticated clientele. We work closely with companies across the sector on a wide range of strategic and operational enhancements, to insure you're positioned to provide the highest quality asset management, investment advice and financial planning services, so your clients meet their financial goals.

Fintech

As investment in fintech reaches an all-time high, we help you capitalize on the opportunity. We bring the flexible delivery of a start-up with the benefits of one of the world’s most experienced organizations to help you design, develop, and scale your fintech solution.

Digital Assets and Blockchain

With web3 enabling the efficient, transparent exchange of value online, digital assets are democratizing transactions and quickly gaining traction. We help demystify this new landscape, adapt your business, and position you for success.

Digitalization and sustainability pose challenges for virtually every industry, but for pulp, paper and packaging companies the issues cut both ways. Digitalization, for example, has significantly cut demand for newsprint, magazines and office paper, but also presents enormous opportunities to improve operations, facilitate e-commerce, and even create new forms of “smart” packaging. Flexible and rigid plastic and metals packaging presents both opportunities and challenges, as does an intense focus on sustainability: companies in the beverages, food, durables, pharma, and industrial packaging subsectors are intensely focused on renewable and recyclable materials, circularity, emissions reductions and a range of related issues.

As they grapple with those issues, companies are also contending with industry consolidation, a surge of capital investment, and a variety of global trade barriers.

We work with companies across the full spectrum of forest products, paper and packaging, helping them develop future-proof strategies, pursue cost and capital efficiencies, and employ a range of automation and digitalization technologies to optimize every facet of their operations. We also bring deep expertise in M&A, organizational design, process control, portfolio transformation, and other disciplines. We have helped companies in every sub-sector, including specialty paper, graphic paper, tissue, wood products, biochemical, pulp, packaging and forestry, set a bold ambition and execute on it flawlessly. We understand the specific challenges of the developing world as well as the issues that dominate mature markets. No matter what your category, we can help you enhance every facet of your organization to thrive amid intense change.

Machinery and equipment makers are hurtling toward a new reality over the next decade, propelled by advanced Industry 4.0 technologies that will enable them to reinvent their capabilities and embrace solutions-centric business models.

New technologies are facilitating ever more complex forms of tightly integrated, end-to-end automation supported by powerful data analytics. New players are entering the market unburdened by legacy business models. 

Given that profit pools in the machinery, systems and control market are expected to double by 2030, companies have plenty of incentive to modernize their tech stacks. We combine deep expertise in digital transformation, Industry 4.0, advanced analytics, cost transformation, organizational design and other disciplines to help you develop and execute a winning strategy.

We can also help you improve all core aspects of operations—from procurement, supply chain and operating models to customer experience, B2B sales and marketing, and engineering excellence—so you achieve significantly higher levels of efficiency and become a performance leader. Our deep experience in private equity and M&A—including unmatched capabilities in due diligence—can help you navigate industry consolidation, analyze long-term market scenarios, and stay out front in a highly dynamic industry.

Mining may be among the oldest of industries, but it’s undergoing a profound transformation. Growth and technology, along with a sharper focus on sustainability and corporate responsibility, have combined to create disruption and economic pressure for even the most well-established mining companies.

To thrive in tomorrow’s world, leaders must make critical decisions today, about corporate strategy, and operating models, to realize the full value of your sites and products, digital transformation, M&A diligence, performance improvement, and more. Success requires that companies evolve across strategic and operational dimensions. That’s where we come in.

Across more than 650 projects in every corner of the globe, we’ve worked with many of the world’s top-performing mining companies. Our teams can help you optimize your portfolio and growth strategy, set your sustainability ambitions, deliver your capital projects, and develop detailed plans to achieve your targets. We’ll show you how to achieve the full potential of your assets through accelerated operational improvement programs, using digital tools that deliver unprecedented value. Our mining consulting teams draw upon a deep well of experience across the entire value chain, from upstream mining to downstream processing to related support functions.

Every day, we work alongside our clients to find new ways to deliver lasting results; that means we don’t simply introduce a new process, tool, or methodology, but rather help your company build the capabilities that make innovation continuous and sustainable.

Mining producers operate in an intensely competitive sector, but there have never been so many opportunities to find an edge. We can help you transform your industry’s biggest challenges into some of your company’s greatest opportunities.

As a leader in the oil and gas industry, you make decisions every day amid deep market uncertainty and relentless pressure to improve performance. Now more than ever you need a trusted advisor to help you chart your path forward. We can help you achieve full potential, build resilience, and reduce risk across the value chain—from exploration and production to retail networks and related services.

We combine deep global experience and cutting-edge methods to help you unlock value and achieve your full potential. Across more than 1,400 oil and gas consulting projects, we’ve helped clients transform into leaner, more agile organizations. Our experts apply unparalleled knowledge to a broad range of industry challenges, including price volatility, supply chain disruption, and the complex shift toward alternative energy sources.

We believe in co-creating solutions that are custom-fit for your company. That means we proactively address change management from Day One, working with your teams at every level and helping them build lasting new capabilities so you continue to build on your success long after our work is done.

Every day our oil and gas experts work alongside leadership teams at companies across the industry. We help exploration and production companies grow through faster, leaner projects across subsectors including onshore, offshore, and unconventionals. We support midstream players in their quest for efficiency and scale. We work with refiners on strategy and operations excellence. We help international and national oil companies, independent producers, and oilfield service companies in their pursuit and deployment of game-changing technologies.

Our expertise can help you improve on cost and productivity, maximize the value of your portfolio, and deploy new digital and analytics tools to unlock the full value of your assets. Our clients respond more effectively to market shifts, reshape portfolios more nimbly, transform their operating models to unlock the full potential of their teams, and win the battle to recruit, develop, and empower the world’s best scientists and engineers. We are known across the petroleum industry for the strong results we help our clients achieve.

Private equity is in our DNA. We are the world’s leading consulting firm for the industry— with a global practice more than three times the size of our nearest competitor. PE comprises about one-third of our global business, having grown eightfold in the last 15 years. Our team of more than 2,000 private equity consultants serves clients globally, providing essential guidance on strategy, sourcing, due diligence, post-acquisition value creation, and institutional investor strategy. Our depth of expertise and strong market positioning have played a pivotal role in more than half of $500 million–plus buyout transactions globally since 2000.

We partner with you throughout the entire investment cycle. Ensuring you have the right investment thesis and winning approach strategy, we help focus your deal generation and sector screening process. Post-acquisition, we support the pursuit of rapid returns by developing strategic blueprints for acquired companies, leading workshops that align management with strategic priorities, and directing focused initiatives.

We have helped the leading institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds develop top-performing investment programs across private equity, real estate, and infrastructure asset classes. As investors ourselves, we leverage our expertise to expand your participation in direct investing opportunities. Proprietary data tools, such as DealEdge, SPS, OPEXEngine, and Pyxis, reveal key insights and boost our best-in-class capabilities.

The private equity landscape is being reshaped by myriad forces: the rise of virtual sales, the omnipresence of digital and rapidly evolving web3 capabilities, a renewed focus on talent, and, most notably, ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing. Leading private equity firms are embracing the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation wholeheartedly. They are also meeting demand for more sustainable, socially conscious corporate behavior, weaving ESG into all operations—and gaining market share in the process.

Amid these shifts, private equity continues to supersize, with larger funds doing larger deals. With a deep bench, proven expertise, and state-of-the-art advanced analytics tools, we can help you navigate these changes and achieve superior results.

The fast-changing world of retail demands adaptability. And our retail consultants know what it takes to stay out front. We pioneered the omnichannel concept a decade ago, and since then have been at the forefront of defining the Future of Retail. 

We're now entering the age of Retail Convergence, in which we see traditional incumbent retailers and digital natives battling for the same customers, talent, profit pools, and shareholders. This convergence—coupled with new waves of technology, proliferating consumer touchpoints, and table stakes sustainability agendas—accelerates the urgency for all players to transform their core retail and digital capabilities.  

We have a proven track record of delivering measurable results, including increased sales, reduced costs, improved customer experience, impactful innovation, and higher shareholder value. Leveraging our proprietary analytics, software platforms, and deep customer insights, we help leading retailers around the world use data, technology, and shopper trends to navigate uncertainty and leapfrog the competition.

Let us help you refine your retail strategy in order to:

• Maximize customer love. Use your deep and proprietary knowledge of your customers to increase customer loyalty and retention, generate promoters, and create personalized shopping journeys that delight consumers beyond their expectations. 
• Excel at core retail. Build the right assortment, pricing, and promotions, balanced with localization, private labels, and innovation to entice customers.
• Redefine the omnichannel footprint. Evolve your supply chain and store networks to not only delight during customer-facing moments, but also ensure fast, resilient, and cost-effective fulfillment. 
• Accelerate the tech transformation. Future-proof your technology and shift spending to business-growing innovation, automation, and data management, all while transforming to an agile, product-based operating model. 
• Tap into new profit streams. Diversify profit pools by moving “beyond trade” into high-growth and high-margin adjacencies such as retail media, data monetization, and new marketplaces. 
• Build a scale ecosystem. Define your role in the ecosystem, from hub to spoke; build scale and new in-house capabilities or through strategic M&A and partnerships.
• Achieve an ultralean cost base. Fund your transformation through a tight cost base, from procurement to stores to your operating model.
• Kick-start your ESG journey. Position your company for a more sustainable future, converting the challenges that seem insurmountable into bite-sized, actionable, and measurable projects.
• Push web3 boundaries. Create connected consumer experiences with innovative store concepts and immersive metaverse encounters that integrate everything from browsing to NFTs to payments. 

We collaborate with you to ensure you win with all stakeholders—customers, communities, NGOs, employees, suppliers, and shareholders—as you future-proof your business. To do so, we prioritize building diverse and inclusive teams that collaborate with a broad ecosystem of industry leaders, including the National Retail Federation and The Consumer Goods Forum. These partnerships, along with our expert executive networks and proprietary data and software tools, uniquely position us to solve your most demanding challenges. 

The nonprofit, government and higher education sectors play a significant role in the global economy—and in the lives of people around the world.

The public sector shapes the framework within which global markets operate; the social sector steps in where governments and markets may fall short in supporting underserved communities. Increasingly, actors in these sectors are adopting innovative change models and leveraging learnings, models and partners from the private sector to achieve their goals. Bain’s work across the private, public and social sectors enables us to help clients transform communities around the world.

Government spending now represents about 20 percent of the $60 trillion total global economy. Bain works with national and regional governments, city municipalities, quasi-government agencies such as development funds and trade associations as well as government-owned companies to realize their economic and social goals.

As executives in the technology space well know, running software, hardware and technology service businesses presents unique management challenges.

In an industry where innovation is both an opportunity and a threat, technology firms must be able to scale fast and pivot even faster. Whatever your company’s focus or life-cycle stage, our industry insights and cross-sector expertise will help you determine the right moves and get fast, sustainable results.

Our technology consultants serve eight of the 10 largest tech conglomerates, three of the five leading software manufacturers, and many of the most influential players in the semiconductor industry. Every day we help these clients identify new avenues for growth, optimize their channel partner networks, and, in semiconductors, improve their strategies and operations to seize opportunities in mobile, autonomous driving, and 5G deployment. We work with clients in IT services, storage, components and peripherals, and every other sector within the tech universe. And our technology practice is backed by our firm’s comprehensive expertise in private equity and telecommunications.

We help market leaders plan acquisitions, streamline R&D processes, boost sales force effectiveness, improve cybersecurity, and reduce costs. We show underperforming companies how to overhaul capital structures, and we show emerging players how to scale up their organizations for the increased complexity that comes with growth. As trusted advisors to CTOs, CIOs, and financial backers, we share a deep understanding of the full potential of cloud computing and the Internet of Things.

The tech industry is one of the most dynamic and consequential sectors of our global economy. But the rising tides don’t necessarily lift all boats. Let us show you how to master the technical and business model innovations that will put you on course toward a new horizon of performance and growth.

The challenge for all telecommunications companies is choosing where and how to participate in the evolving markets.

Telcos face a paradox: The connectivity they provide is more important than ever, to consumers and business alike. Yet key financial and customer satisfaction measures are low and getting lower, forcing telcos to make hard choices about where to play and how to win.

That challenge is made all the more difficult by several disruptive forces that will upend the traditional integrated telco model over the next decade. To respond effectively, companies will need to adapt their strategies and operating models. Maintaining the status quo will not be an option, and companies will face focused, built-for-purpose competitors in four distinct arenas: infrastructure, services, platforms, and vertical solutions.

Telcos will therefore need to unlearn the old ways and quickly adapt to this new reality. Pick your arena, or arenas, wisely, and understand that each has a very distinct set of rules that define success.

Where to Play and How to Win

We can help you decide where to play, when to transition to a new model, and how to understand the rules that define each arena. Our telecom consulting experts have transformed the businesses of most major players across the industry: We’ve helped 93% of the world’s top 30 telecom operators, and we are the leading adviser for private equity funds on telecom deals. We work closely with you to determine your ideal fighting shape, your capacity for change, your hyper-personalization strategy, your current and future technological capabilities and priorities, and, above all, your customer centricity.

We combine deep industry expertise, strategic partnerships, and proprietary tools to help you:

• Make the right core strategic decisions about wireless/wireline strategy, fixed-mobile convergence, layer strategy, and more
• Optimize your infrastructure investment for the highest return given your competitive situation
• Simplify products and processes, reduce costs, and optimize capex to make you more efficient and effective while better serving your customers
• Reimagine your operating model to be better prepared for consumer and competitor actions
• Understand—and leverage—M&A opportunities and best practices
• Embrace the future by integrating AI into your capabilities and processes
• Embed environmental, social, and governance best practices in all operations

The telecommunications industry is at an inflection point. The telco of the future will embrace new technologies and processes while keeping customer needs front and center.

Few industries are as demanding as transportation services. That's why it is critical to implement high-impact strategies quickly and effectively.

Our deep expertise across transportation, logistics and digitally enabled mobility ensures that your organization keeps people—and the things people depend on—moving more efficiently than ever. Our transportation consultants have helped hundreds of express, parcel and post companies, trucking companies, third-party logistics providers, railways, port operators, ocean shippers and distributors, mass transit systems and other transportation companies around the world solve complex problems and seize leadership positions.

Freight & Logistics

Freight and logistics historically have been a fragmented, shifting industry that is highly dependent upon materials demand and driven by GDP growth. 

Public Transit

Bain has completed hundreds of projects to improve performance for passenger transportation companies in all major markets.

Around the globe, utility companies are under enormous pressure. As customers demand greater value, utilities face a shifting competitive landscape, rapidly evolving regulations, and the growing threat of climate change. Despite these pressures our clients consistently turn adversity to their advantage, collaborating with us to grow stronger, more efficient, and more innovative while improving their impact on the planet and communities they serve.

Across more than 2,000 projects we’ve helped clients in every sector of the utilities industry: power generators, electric and gas utilities, multi-utility conglomerates, renewable energy providers, energy trading companies, gas storage and distribution players, energy service companies, water utilities, retailers, and diversified global energy corporations. We are also leaders in waste management and recycling services, helping to reshape that sector to be at the center of a more circular economy. Our deep expertise and broad perspective allow us to tailor solutions that meet your exact needs.

Our teams will help you enhance every facet of operations. We’ll work with you to craft a new growth strategy, improve customer experience, retool your operating model, improve operations, reshape capabilities and talent, and reach your decarbonization goals. Our energy consulting teams can help you introduce new technologies and implement data strategies that will put you at the front of the digital revolution.

The coming years will only intensify the global effort to draw energy from solar, wind, nuclear, hydrogen, and other sources of sustainable energy to mitigate the impact from climate change. This challenge requires greater innovation, improving the social compact with communities, and delivering on the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders.

It’s a tough market out there, with big changes on the horizon; we offer unmatched expertise that can help you build lasting solutions.

Agriculture and humankind have transformed each other for millennia, but new factors have altered the balance and accelerated the change. Disruptive technologies, relentless global competition, and urgent ecological concerns are forcing agribusiness leaders to undertake bold innovations that are sustainable—both for the planet and the corporate bottom line.

We can help you meet these challenges, and prosper. With more than 1,250 engagements across every region and sector of the industry, our agriculture consulting teams have the experience to help you grow sustainably, transform your cost structure, or update your operating model.

Our global network of experts will introduce you to the latest advances in regenerative and green agriculture, alternative protein, fermentation, and plant-based protein production. Our deep experience across the entire agricultural value chain means we can help you seize opportunities related to fertilizers, equipment, and biofuels. We’ve helped clients improve yields and capture more profit, whether they produce dairy, seeds, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, fish, or nearly any variety of crops, including corn, wheat, rice, oilseeds, and sugarcane.

Rising global demand and limited arable land mean it’s more critical than ever to maximize your yields and streamline your operating model. We specialize in helping you achieve a self-reinforcing cycle of discipline that merges operational excellence, capital productivity, commercial excellence, technology and data, and organizational capabilities.

We understand that you’re working in a complex business, where competition for alternative fuel sources is fierce. Governmental regulations can change and contradict each other, often threatening to suppress yield and disrupt trade. But you don’t have to navigate these issues alone.

Feeding the world population in the decades to come will require agriculture companies to operate with vision, discipline, and adaptability. We can help you meet every challenge—even those that remain unforeseen.

Trade wars, the impact of Covid-19, the rise of metal-intensive electric vehicles and, above all, an intense focus on sustainability are just some of the forces disrupting the metals industry today, demanding bold new strategies and a relentless focus on operational efficiency.

We can help you navigate this fast-changing landscape and master the digital technologies and commercial capabilities that will enable you to compete, innovate, and grow. Our metals consulting experts work in every global region, helping many of the world’s top-performing extractors and manufacturers of aluminum, gold, copper, iron, steel, and rare elements achieve the operational efficiencies that power breakthrough results. Around the world, we help our clients with cost transformation, commercial excellence, and a range of sustainability strategies that can help metals companies reduce carbon emissions as they pursue green steel, green aluminum, and more.

What does it take to outperform? We’ve identified six imperatives for metals companies: scale of operations, lowest cost of production, digital capabilities, M&A expertise, backward integration, and brand premium/differentiated product portfolio. Our deep experience across every subsector of the metals industry—from exploration to primary metal production, fabrication, and distribution—combined with a wealth of domain expertise across every area of operations, ensures that you meet these challenges and emerge a market leader.

Real estate was once considered a relative safe harbor, an asset class marked by steady value creation and predictable trends. Those days are over. New technologies, the global pandemic, and urgent sustainability concerns are now disrupting the industry in ways that raise the stakes for every decision real estate investors make.

We can help you navigate these rough new seas. Across hundreds of client engagements around the world, our real estate consulting expertise has played a pivotal role in helping leaders in residential, commercial, and industrial real estate stay ahead amid relentless competition.

We work with property owners, REITs, service providers and a wide range of other players to maximize their value, shape their growth strategies, and become more innovative. For instance, our unique location intelligence solution, Vantage℠, brings user-friendly advanced analytics to critical site-selection decisions. We bring world-renowned expertise in corporate strategy, cost transformation, cash and capital management issues, organizational design, mergers and acquisition, due diligence, post-merger integration, and customer experience and loyalty to every project, providing you with the big-picture view that ensures you achieve maximum value.

The COVID crisis, and its impact on commercial office space, has raised the potential for converting office buildings into housing in some areas. Meanwhile specialized players are rehabilitating wastelands and former industrial sites, both inside and outside of cities. We can help you understand what kind of opportunities these trends may represent for your company. 

The world’s population today is on the move, as people and businesses rethink virtually every aspect about where to live and work. These shifts carry profound implications for real estate investors, developers, and managers. Now is the time to apply the full breadth of our expertise to emerging opportunities. Now is the time to unify your company around a strategy that keeps you on top.

Bain has decades of experience helping higher educational institutions of all types address strategic issues such as performance improvement, operating efficiency, cost management and reduction, growth strategy, organizational effectiveness and funding strategy.

What We Do

Universities are reacting with determination and creativity to the new challenges they face. Budget deficits have mushroomed following sudden declines in endowment values, deep cuts in education funding and limits on tuition increases.

Competition in the global job market is making new programs, new training and new models of instruction essential in order for students to obtain gainful employment after graduation. And amidst a fluctuating student population, universities are harnessing new technologies, such as e-learning, as a way to reach even more students.

These pressures place core academic missions of teaching, research and outreach at risk. To help bring the focus back to schools' core missions, Bain is helping institutions get back on the path to success:

• We are working to redesign the university model to make higher education a reality for more students across the US.
• We closely examine school operations and organizations to determine which administrative support functions, and redundancies, are diverting scarce resources away from higher education's core purpose.
• We are finding ways to rationalize traditionally decentralized and highly complex organization structures with widely disparate service levels and unworkable spans of control.

Having mostly rebounded from its pandemic-era dip, the travel and leisure industry is poised for take-off. New forces, including technological advances, an emphasis on personalized experiences, and increased pressure on profitability, will require that players evolve to win.

We help guide travel and leisure innovators, operators, and investors, leveraging deep industry experience that includes hundreds of projects for clients including travel agencies, their online counterparts, tour operators, airlines, hotels, short-term rentals, cruises, casinos, theme parks and other location-based entertainment. Our travel and leisure consultants are immersed in the unique dynamics of each sub-sector and can help you better understand how to serve today’s customer, navigate emerging challenges, and build a strategy that ensures growth and sustainability.

The hospitality industry has long demonstrated resilience to macro-challenges—even finding opportunities amid them. Covid-19, for example, reframed work expectations, enabling the blurring of lines between business and leisure travel. Now, hyper-personalization, the growing importance of sustainability, and the rise of technology like generative AI are creating new ways to deliver value. As the industry continues to face changing consumer needs and economic pressures, we’re your trusted partners in the journey to smart growth now and in the future.

Deliver great customer experiences that increase loyalty and decrease costs.

Leading companies know that great products are necessary but not sufficient: In today’s world, you have to deliver great customer experiences in order to succeed. We call our approach Simple & Digital. We provide the expertise and tools that help you figure out what matters most to customers, and equip your team to deliver delightful experiences while simplifying processes and eliminating costs. These efforts will yield happy customers, happy employees and happy shareholders — a triple play of results that you can measure and accelerate through the Net Promoter SystemSM and our breakthrough benchmarking service, NPS Prism®.

Achieve consistently higher returns with a systematic and repeatable approach.

The question isn’t whether to do deals but how to do them so that they create sustainable value. Our answer: Use M&A as an integral part of your global growth strategy, plan for opportunities long before they arise, and build a repeatable acquisition model honed through frequent, continuous deal making. Our M&A advisory experts can help you every step of the way to:

Improve your odds of success by honing your M&A strategy and objectives, developing your M&A team and capabilities, and building a repeatable process.

Take due diligence to the next level with a fact-based, rigorously quantified assessment that helps you ward off deal fever, spot synergies others miss, and prepare for integration long before the deal is inked.

Capture maximum value from corporate acquisitions with a battle-tested approach to integration that mitigates the many risks that can undercut a deal’s anticipated synergies. Companies that turn to Bain for integration support realize 18% more value, on average, than those that don’t.

Attain the highest possible return from divestitures by preparing the asset for sale, running a low-risk carve-out program and shaping the remaining business to thrive post-transaction. We can also help you maximize the value of spin-offs and joint ventures and alliances.

We specialize in designing and developing efficient and effective customer service operations that support customer acquisition, retention, cost management and profitability. We combine deep expertise in advanced analytics with superior design capabilities to move quickly from prototype to full-scale deployment. Our service operations consultants have helped hundreds of companies solve a multitude of service-related problems, including reducing unnecessary work volumes, improving first-time rates, placing the right person with the right job, reshaping capacity requirements, developing staffing models, radically redesigning for fast and flawless episodes, and more.

Improve performance by ensuring your people can deliver on your strategy.

How do you grow sustainably while preserving an insurgent mindset? How do you boost efficiency while remaining flexible? How do you launch and scale innovation while continuing to execute tried and tested processes? We help you balance all these considerations and more, ensuring that you attract and retain great talent and effectively manage organizational change.

We advise investors across the entire investment life cycle.

Private equity is in our DNA. We are the world’s leading consulting firm for the industry— with a global practice more than three times the size of our nearest competitor. PE comprises about one-third of our global business, having grown eightfold in the last 15 years. Our team of more than 2,000 private equity consultants serves clients globally, providing essential guidance on strategy, sourcing, due diligence, post-acquisition value creation, and institutional investor strategy. Our depth of expertise and strong market positioning have played a pivotal role in more than half of $500 million–plus buyout transactions globally since 2000.

We partner with you throughout the entire investment cycle. Ensuring you have the right investment thesis and winning approach strategy, we help focus your deal generation and sector screening process. Post-acquisition, we support the pursuit of rapid returns by developing strategic blueprints for acquired companies, leading workshops that align management with strategic priorities, and directing focused initiatives.

We have helped the leading institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds develop top-performing investment programs across private equity, real estate, and infrastructure asset classes. As investors ourselves, we leverage our expertise to expand your participation in direct investing opportunities. Proprietary data tools, such as DealEdge, SPS, OPEXEngine, and Pyxis, reveal key insights and boost our best-in-class capabilities.

The private equity landscape is being reshaped by myriad forces: the rise of virtual sales, the omnipresence of digital and rapidly evolving web3 capabilities, a renewed focus on talent, and, most notably, ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing. Leading private equity firms are embracing the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation wholeheartedly. They are also meeting demand for more sustainable, socially conscious corporate behavior, weaving ESG into all operations—and gaining market share in the process.

Amid these shifts, private equity continues to supersize, with larger funds doing larger deals. With a deep bench, proven expertise, and state-of-the-art advanced analytics tools, we can help you navigate these changes and achieve superior results.

Reduce your cost base. Sustain the gains. Repeat.

Today’s business environment demands a comprehensive procurement strategy driven from top to bottom by fresh, actionable data, so you can make quick decisions and execute seamlessly. 

With more than 500 professionals working in every major industry, our global procurement practice offers state-of-the-art expertise in every element of the procurement cycle. Our unparalleled ability to provide end-to-end support allows our procurement consultants and practitioners to help you identify and capture value. We’ll show you how to transform your operations, with solutions tailored to your business strategy, market conditions, and operating model. 

We provide holistic, data-driven procurement solutions built on cutting-edge analytics. Buy Better + Spend Better®, our unique, cross-functional approach to savings delivery, enables sustainability and availability. We work closely with your team to identify and realize savings across every spend category and capability, and build lasting capability through hands-on partnership and training.

Our expertise is complemented by partnerships with a wide range of digital procurement and data analytics firms. Whatever your needs, we’ll help you build the organizational muscles to achieve spectacular, sustainable results.

Build a customer-focused—and growth-oriented—organization.

We help you achieve sustainable, organic growth by putting your customers at the center of your company’s strategy. Our approach tests every element of your customers’ experience, delivering optimal interactions at every touchpoint.

From our breakthrough research on customer loyalty to our proven approach to customer episode redesign, we offer the insights to help you realize the full sales and marketing potential. That includes our Net Promoter System℠, the gold standard in frameworks for measuring customer loyalty and maximizing its power for your bottom line.

We don’t just help your organization develop a rock-solid strategy; our team will help you execute on every ambition, providing the tools, diagnostics and benchmarks necessary to transform how you serve your customers and earn their lasting devotion.

Join the elite ranks of sustained value creators.

In an era of disruption, strategy is more important than ever. We offer creative solutions that have helped thousands of companies across all geographies and sectors develop and execute winning strategies. We’ve been a strategy thought leader for nearly five decades, and we bring unrivaled capabilities, tools, technologies, and talent to every engagement, augmented by an ecosystem of best-of-breed partners that provide specialized expertise. We’ll help you mobilize for change, navigate uncertainty, and flex as needed, so you achieve sustained, profitable growth—a feat only 1 in 11 companies manages to pull off.

Corporate Strategy

Charting the right course to sustained value creation

Business Strategy

Win today and in the future

Next℠ Innovation & Business Building

Create new products and businesses, from seed to scale.

Embed principles that become a source of ongoing and increasing value.

Every company is at its own stage in the journey toward a more sustainable, responsible, and equitable future. But what the leaders understand is that opportunities abound; embedding sustainability and corporate responsibility capabilities can create enormous value. Just look at the successful, enduring transformations we’ve enabled for our clients.

Our pragmatic solutions and integrated expertise ensure that your whole organization maximizes the ROI of your sustainability investments. And we understand that the most challenging sustainability issues can’t be fixed alone, so we'll help you foster multi-stakeholder collaboration and partnerships across your value chain.

We can help you embed sustainability in every facet of your strategy and operations, to address everything from energy and emissions to investments and due diligence. Our sustainability consulting expertise extends to plastics recycling and sustainable materials, sustainable food systems, supply chain optimization, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Our experience shows that vision and pragmatism go hand in hand. We can help you root sustainability in your core strategy, helping you translate ambitious goals into practical, actionable plans that get results.

Change the trajectory of your business and achieve extraordinary results.

Whether you have an urgent need to improve financial performance or a burning desire to reinvent your business to stay ahead of the competition, there are times when only a bold, comprehensive transformation program will do. We provide the expertise, tools, and materials you need to align your leadership on a shared vision of what the future can be and mobilize the organization to achieve it.

Business Transformation spans your entire organization, to address all the changes needed to reach your full ambition. Most critically, we drive change through the front lines, with innovative solutions, rapid scaling and the skill-building required to sustain your success. We are uniquely positioned to provide the broad capabilities and expertise required to make this happen—after all, strategic transformation has been at the core of what we do for more than 40 years. If your company is falling short of its full potential we can guide you on a cross-functional effort that will culminate in sustained, superior performance.

The world is changing faster than ever. New customer demands, urgent sustainability imperatives, and breakthrough technologies have left many businesses scrambling to keep up. We created Next to partner with founders as they envision the future, create new products and businesses, and strengthen the organizational muscles needed to accelerate from seed to scale.

We partner with change-minded executives to reimagine business models, push industry boundaries, and delight ever-more-demanding customers. Next supports every phase of new product and business building:

Innovate

We'll help you spot the unmet customer need you're best positioned to address and define the most relevant and viable value proposition.

Create

Iterate the solution to ensure market fit, make critical build/partner/buy decisions,

and build a team that can deliver.

Scale

Accelerate customer adoption

in new segments and geographies, and continuously improve to realize 10X growth.

The pandemic, trade wars, and severe storms: these are just a few of the disruptions recently churning markets. Today the entire world appreciates the value of resilient and sustainable supply chains. But it’s nothing new for our firm. We’ve been helping clients achieve these virtues for decades.

Whether you want to undertake an end-to-end strategic transformation, or targeted fixes for specific links in your operations to increase supply chain resiliency, our supply chain consultants are the perfect partners to collaborate with on Supply Chain Reinvention. We combine proprietary digital capabilities, deep domain expertise, and a rich database of your industry’s key performance indicators to create highly effective, customized solutions. We augment our supply chain expertise with a proven track record in areas spanning change management, sustainability, digital transformation, and more.

When done right, decarbonizing your operations and supply chain not only benefits the environment but can also improve your company’s bottom- and top-line performances. We’ve worked with leading companies to execute this change across more than a dozen industries. Our experienced teams help you identify and implement actions that matter for carbon reduction.

Whether you seek a rapid diagnostic to determine potential reduction options or a complete decarbonization transformation, all with a focus on cost and revenue enhancement, we can assist you in developing a clear set of priority actions and a full understanding of financial implications. You’ll accelerate overall progress toward net-zero and make your company’s greenhouse gas abatement programs a point of resilience and competitive advantage.

From the boardroom to the shop floor, we can help you improve every facet of your manufacturing operation, tailoring an approach that scales from targeted enhancements to a complete reinvention of your capabilities. Our manufacturing consultants provide the domain expertise, tools, diagnostics, benchmarks, third-party specialists and best practices you need to achieve immediate value today as you build toward your long-term vision. The Bain & Bosch Connected Industry collaboration brings you real-world guidance on Industry 4.0 execution strategies, so you can embrace digitalization faster and more effectively than your competitors.

Innovation is the cornerstone of sustained, profitable growth. We can help you strengthen your innovation muscle and achieve a step-change in product development effectiveness, engineering efficiency and R&D excellence.

Your growth depends on the new products and services you bring to market. To do that effectively you need a well-managed innovation portfolio, the right R&D operating model, a systemic way to reduce costs and complexity, savvy risk management, and more.

Our integrated approach to innovation and product development helps companies in many industries—including advanced manufacturing, energy and natural resources, consumer products, technology, and others—solve these and the many related challenges associated with developing innovative new products.

What to Expect

Innovation strategy

Make the right choices about what to develop and how to blend in-house and external sourcing options.

Development efficiency

Create a strong engineering organization that embraces a best-in-class product development process marked by increased efficiency and speed.

Sustainability

Embrace a bold sustainability agenda that marries your innovation ambition to a vision of greener, more sustainable products and services.

Scale effectiveness

Address current pain points, adopt industry best practices, and develop a repeatable model for efficient, on-time large-scale program execution.

By combining lean manufacturing with digital capabilities companies can eliminate more waste, save more money and efficiently execute their manufacturing strategies. We provide the expertise and tools you need to accelerate your progress and transform your business.

Lean Six Sigma integrates traditional lean methodologies with a robust set of digital capabilities to transform your manufacturing operations. We focus on the areas of greatest value—for example, using overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) to identify high-potential opportunities. We deploy lean tools selectively, applying the right ones based on current strategy, the value at stake and the front line’s ability to adopt them.

We help you enforce line accountability, ensuring that change is led by frontline management and embedded in the daily steering routine. And we help you get results fast, using a three-phase approach (diagnose, design, implement) that quickly advances you to your future state. Our Manufacturing Full-Potential Diagnostic assesses your starting point across four critical areas of manufacturing (Lean, digital/Industry 4.0, supply chain and footprint design) supported by a robust set of proprietary benchmarking data. Our approach to digital also includes Four-Wall Lean Full-Potential, a complementary capability that ensures you reduce complexity and enhance productivity.

For a closer look, our Digital Lean Playbook explains how we help you apply the right technologies across seven distinct levers to transform your operations and become a performance leader.

If people are your most important asset it makes sense to invest in them accordingly. We work with companies in every industry to help leaders become more inspirational, managers more capable, front-line employees more responsive to customer needs and organizations better-equipped to meet a range of talent needs. We combine original research on effective leadership with best-in-class training to help everyone reach their full potential.

Your business can't truly thrive unless every employee is thriving. But the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategies of yesterday simply aren’t enough to build an innovative, future-ready culture that embraces diversity at every stage, from recruitment through retention and advancement. 

As innovators in diversity consulting, we can help. DEI is embedded in our mission, and through our own journey we’ve built extraordinary teams and an award-winning culture. We've spent decades supporting our clients in people-centered organizational transformations, and we've learned many valuable lessons along the way. We know that a more diverse and inclusive environment doesn't just benefit employees; companies that commit to DEI outperform their peers across a wide range of critical metrics. 

Culture is behavior at scale. Companies that create a winning culture are five times more likely to be top performers. Our proven approach to culture change is based on behavioral science and can transform your organization.

Your company's culture can provide a huge competitive advantage. Get it right and you not only boost total shareholder return and EBIT growth by up to 500%, and revenue by a factor of 10, but create an advantage that's hard for competitors to copy.

Whether in the context of an acquisition, to overcome a cultural impediment, or to ensure the values you've defined translate into actual behaviors, we can help. Our experience and expertise combined with our state-of-the-art tools, including our Winning Culture Diagnostic and Culture Integration Diagnostic, enable us to help you successfully address every element of culture change, from initial assessment through implementation and continuous monitoring and refinement.

To survive and thrive in today’s business climate you don’t just need to adapt: you need adapt quickly and effectively, again and again. That requires an organization that can keep pace with shifting industry boundaries, rapidly evolving technologies, and unpredictable change and disruption.

Yet 80% of senior executives don’t believe their organizations are structured in a way that helps them outperform. Rigidity, incrementalism and poor execution create complexity and hamper the organization’s ability to move at speed.

The right operating model can change all that. It provides an integrated system that unleashes the star power of your teams, ensuring that they are aligned, capable, effective, adaptable, efficient and inspired. They’ll be prepared and motivated to go the extra mile, executing on strategy at speed and with purpose.

Your Operating Model: Six Essential Areas of Focus

1

Leadership & Culture

We help you address the behaviors, decision styles and mindsets of the senior leadership team, and make sure that your culture and ways of working are aligned behind your values and purpose, and supported by the right capabilities

2

Management System

To make the most of today’s opportunities many companies will need to move away from annual cycles and time-bound strategies, budgets and review processes. A Dynamic Management System provides an integrated, interdependent set of processes and operating rhythm that helps you optimize strategic planning, resource allocation, the business review process, and much more. 

3

Structure & Accountabilities

Eliminate layers in your organization, align business areas to customer value, and create a living, modular approach to team deployment across customer solutions, process and technologies. Launch persistent cross-functional teams charged with changing the business, and develop a scaling model for seamless coordination across functions and hundreds of teams.

4

Talent Engine

Develop both a talent strategy and a talent system, so you can offer a differentiated and compelling employee value proposition, create a multi-year workforce evolution roadmap, ensure that your best talent is focused on your top priorities, and recruit, hire and inspire the best people across every part of the organization

5

Business Processes

Remove bureaucratic bottlenecks and seamlessly connect processes across your full ecosystem. Redesign your processes to serve customer solutions, and ensure that support and control functions participate in a way that accelerates innovation.

6

Technology & Data

We understand your current and future-state technology and data needs, and make sure they come together with the human elements of your operating model, to unlock performance and build organizational capability. 

Identifying behavior changes that get results is the easy part. The challenge? Activating and sustaining them. Our science-based approach helps teams work together to remove friction and create meaningful reinforcement, strengthening key behaviors across your organization.

Traditional techniques to encourage behavior change, such as communications, training, and nudges, often fail to make new habits stick. Using people-centered methodologies grounded in behavioral science, we engage teams so that adopting new behaviors feels natural and soon becomes second nature.

By determining which business objectives can only be achieved through behavior change, we will help you prioritize, focusing on specific employee groups and behaviors. Insights and pattern recognition reveal which changes will have the most impact. But pinpointing the most significant behavior changes doesn’t mean they’ll become habitual—the pull of conflicting influences, distractions, and motivations is strong. That’s when we deploy our Moments of Truth toolkit.

Moments of truth are pivotal occasions when choosing a specific behavior is crucial but competing factors make it difficult to take the desired action. Working with you, we design a roadmap to establish behavior change enablers and address friction, so completing the changed behavior is easier and more fulfilling. Enlisting team members as co-creators of solutions imparts a sense of ownership, building commitment to and excitement about practicing the new behaviors. 

Our proprietary Behavior Sprints move teams from theory to practice and are enabled by digital feedback loops. Our approach enables people to safely try a new behavior and embed it in their daily work, combining the power of personal agency and self-development with team-based support to accelerate change.  

Agile is a proven way to transform your business, catalyze innovation, and accelerate profitable growth. We can help you scale Agile across your entire organization to improve time-to-market, boost quality, raise employee morale, and become a truly adaptive organization.

If you are just getting started we'll provide the foundational training you need to launch your first Agile teams. Once you have developed some foundational capabilities we'll show you how to scale dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of Agile teams, creating a truly Agile enterprise.

We've worked on hundreds of Agile projects at dozens of companies, often leveraging our exclusive partnership with Scrum Inc., co-creators of the Scrum methodology at the heart of Agile. We now have nearly 700 Certified Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Did we mention a 60% improvement in the success rate of large projects?

We have a proven method for transforming companies into truly Agile enterprises and propelling Agile transformations. It begins with our Agility Quotient diagnostic, which assesses your company’s maturity on critical enablers, and progresses through a structured program that culminates with Agile fully embedded throughout your organization.

We provide unmatched training and support, instilling Agile capabilities and expertise across your teams and throughout your company to ensure your organization continues to reap the benefits of Agile long after we’ve left. With Agile stitched into the fabric of your company’s culture, you’ll remain nimble and responsive to changing market conditions for many years to come.

We will also help you spot and overcome the cultural barriers that often derail Agile efforts, such as bureaucratic bottlenecks, poor collaboration, or misconceptions about which activities are well-suited to Agile and which are not. 

Properly implemented, Agile can enable you to outpace your competition, react quickly to changing market conditions, adjust the balance of innovation to routine work, and continuously incorporate customer feedback. It is a step-by-step approach to a truly transformational change in how your business operates.

Rethink what work gets done, and how it gets done, with zero-based redesign. We’ll help you take a clean-sheet approach that transforms your operating model to simplify your organization, streamline work processes, reveal digital opportunities and unlock massive savings. 

Zero-based redesign (ZBR) helps you focus on the activities that fuel your competitive advantage, and eliminate many of the ones that don’t. Traditional efforts to streamline and simplify settle for incremental changes to the status quo, and savings tend to be temporary as costs creep back in. ZBR, in contrast, is a one-time effort that sets a bold ambition defined by the activities that are critical to delivering what your customers value most about you. Organizational structure, governance, accountabilities and processes are integrated to meet the needs of your customers and optimize the efficiency of your front line. The result: a structured transformation journey that delivers value from Day One and propels you to your ideal future state. When combined with zero-based budgeting the impact is even more transformative, as your entire organization adopts a new mindset and new behaviors around cost, continuously striving for maximum efficiency and greater savings.

Fuel innovation and transformation with human-centered design, rapid prototyping, customer journey mapping, and more.

Our Innovation & Design teams bring you the experience and multi-disciplinary expertise you need to transform your approach to innovation.

At a time when 92% of CEOs say it’s time to rethink how work gets done, we’re ready to help you conceive, design and scale the businesses, products and experiences that will turn your strategic vision into a game-changing reality faster than you thought possible.

Boost marketing ROI by elevating your brand creative, media and marketing technology to create great customer experiences.

Acquired in 2018, FRWD has now expanded across 15 offices worldwide attracting top practitioners from in-house marketing teams, leading agencies and platform technology companies.

A fully-integrated delivery resource within Bain & Company’s Customer Practice, FRWD teams with you to unlock growth potential, improve ROI and establish leading-edge capabilities that drive sustainable competitive advantage.

Fueled by expert perspective, Bain & Company provides marketers with a uniquely rigorous top-down / bottom-up approach to deliver a clear and actionable roadmap for your teams. We combine big picture strategic thinking with detailed specificity to offer marketers a risk-adjusted, clear view of full potential.

Our 200+ experts help you and your teams define not only “what” to do and “why”, but most importantly “how” with a focus on practical steps to accelerate business outcomes with confidence.

Turn your data assets into a true competitive advantage and accelerate your growth thanks to better, faster decision making.

We help you extract maximum value from all your data assets, no matter their location or format. Our analytics experts collaborate with you to tackle your most daunting challenges, so you not only get results quickly but build the internal skills to extend your new data prowess.

We apply the latest analytics techniques and tools to help you generate insights that yield better, faster decisions. From connected customer and data driven supply chain to enhanced go-to-market strategies and improved employee engagement, our Advanced Analytics team can help you reinvent your operations and transform your data into a perpetual source of value.

How we can help

Data and Analytics Transformation

Across every industry and geography, our Data and Analytics Transformation expertise has helped companies achieve end-to-end analytics mastery. Our pragmatic approach is built on value-added analytics strategy and agile methodology, augmented by the specialized skills of best-of-breed partners. We're thought leaders on data and advanced analytics, based not only on our work with clients but also on our many use case products.

Test for Results

Test for Results is a powerful in-market experimental method, an analytics-driven approach that has helped companies make exceptional improvements to their product development, digital marketing, pricing, user experience, and other key business activities.

We examine every step of the customer journey, using advanced customer analytics, and user-experience design, to determine which content, experiences and product features resonate with customers. Our data and analytics experts and digital designers work with you to understand your unique priorities and then apply the principles of design thinking to develop a pipeline of tests to optimize these variables. By applying cutting-edge techniques, including fractional factorial multi-variate testing (MVT) and multi-armed bandit testing (MAB), we generate results faster and help you get the most insight from your samples.

We help your teams to build and establish a Test for Results practice, customized to your organization. Working side-by-side, we provide best practices, coaching and training so your teams can master the newly-created capabilities and continue the process of testing and improving. The result? Bigger, bolder ideas that translate to extraordinary impact and an experimentation engine that continues to drive results.

Demand Forecasting

The days of simply creating a “set it and forget it” demand forecasting algorithm are gone. Today’s turbulent times demand adaptation and continuous adjustment. But it’s not enough to think about lower forecast error. You need to translate these adjustments into better business outcomes by thinking beyond sophistication to orchestration across your organization.

Our Demand Forecasting Center of Excellence believes that better data beats better algorithms. With this lesson in mind, we use your company’s historical and near real-time data to predict consumers’ behaviors and attitudes, while also bringing external data to the mix—think online searches, smartphone mobility data, and social media posts.

Demand forecasting is a change management effort as well as a technical one, so we also focus on the human element. By designing user-friendly interfaces and providing extensive staff training, we ensure your teams have the skills they need to produce and interpret reliable forecasts, as well as to understand and apply them.

Since many of these forecasts are part of automated pipelines that produce thousands or even millions of individual predictions, forecasting is often as much a software engineering challenge as a statistical one. Our software engineering teams ensure that computational efficiency is fully addressed, so you don’t get surprised by your cloud computing bills.

Another key decision is when considering demand forecasting is “build versus buy.” To supplement early prototyping efforts to improve your forecast pipeline, we maintain a database of requirements and relevant vendors to help you through this important choice.

Finally, consistency counts. We reconcile demand forecasting across every facet of your organization, encompassing operations as wide-ranging as research and development, consumer pricing, and network optimization. By doing this we ensure that all of your operations are as smart as any of your individual efforts, today and well into the future.

Don’t just improve the status quo: reinvent how work gets done. 

We believe that success in automation requires more than just great technology. We collaborate with you on an end-to-end automation journey that begins by aligning the organization around the opportunity—and what it will take to capture it—and progresses through every stage of business and technical planning, culminating in the realization of the full potential value.

We work collaboratively with you to identify and prioritize the right automation opportunities, develop the business case, conduct proof-of-concepts and pilots, and support fully scaled deployments. Most importantly, we help you put in place the right operating model, governance, and change management that will work in your unique culture.

Our dedicated team of experts can help your organization map and accelerate your journey. In addition to our in-house experts, we rely on a network of top-of-the-line technology and service partners who specialize in traditional and cutting-edge automation applications. Together we work with technologies including robotics process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM)/workflow, intelligent document processing (IDP), and artificial intelligence, including machine learning and conversational AI.

Finally, automation is only as good as the results achieved from it—whether that’s cost savings, improved customer experience, lower error rates or greater speed. We help you redesign your business processes to optimally combine people and technology so that your automation efforts fully meet your expectations.

Achieve game-changing levels of performance by investing confidently in the technologies and infrastructure that support your digital ambition.

We believe that a company’s corporate strategy both guides and is influenced by its technology strategy. No matter what your starting point, we can help you determine the technology capabilities, systems and people you need to succeed. Our enterprise technology consulting expertise can help you:

·     Align your technology strategy with your business ambition and chart your digital transformation

·     Modernize your systems and architecture, with a detailed roadmap grounded in your unique needs

·     Embrace modern operating models and Agile methods to increase the productivity, quality and efficiency of your enterprise technology function

·     Implement a virtuous and dependable funding model

·     Achieve your most ambitious technology transformation goals with Delivery Assurance

·     Make technology a source of M&A success

·     Plan a migration strategy with confidence, while mitigating risks

How we can help

Technology Strategy and Transformation

Your technology strategy should be a logical extension of your business strategy. With an eye on costs and cutting-edge innovation, we'll help you align your people and systems around a bold technology transformation.

More than 90% of companies struggle to deliver on the promises of a technology-enabled business. We can help you understand your point of departure, define your ambition, prioritize investments, design the right approach and orchestrate sustainable change.

Systems and Architecture

Digital transformation puts entirely new demands and expectations on your systems and architecture. We’ll help you modernize your entire technology stack to become a true technology-enabled leader.

With tens of billions of connected devices around the world, and with 80% or more of all business processes either digitized or eliminated, digitalization is unquestionably the new reality. To thrive in this radically transformed business landscape you need technology systems, applications and infrastructure that are designed to be flexible, responsive and reliable.

We provide IT consulting expertise and experience across every facet of technology modernization from developing best-in-class customer engagement systems, to migrating to modern ERP platforms, automating operations, utilizing modern data architecture, executing cloud strategy, securing your business environment and more. Our expanding ecosystem of best-of-breed partners provides specialized capabilities. Our approach will accelerate your technology transformation to make your architecture future-proof.

Technology Operating Model

Your people are central to your technology strategy. We'll help you maximize their contributions through Agile delivery models as you refine product management, governance and organizational structure.

Companies are spending more on technology, yet major transformations usually fail. Often the problem lies with the IT organization itself: team members with critical skills aren't empowered to use them, Agile delivery isn’t bringing the expected benefits and the organization is unable to react quickly to changes in the technology landscape.

Technology Operating Model enables high-velocity change, consistent governance and a comprehensive talent strategy that ensures your IT organization is set up for success. We equip your technology leaders with the tools and processes for effective decision-making, help you redesign how work gets done, and organize your teams for accountability and effectiveness.

The interactive graphic below demonstrates one of our approaches to assessing an organization's technology function and how it can achieve a more balanced distribution of roles.

Technology Cost Management

The costs of digitalization are pushing technology budgets up, both in absolute dollars and as a share of operating expenses. We'll help you adopt cost management practices that eliminate waste and propel your strategy.

About 80% of a typical IT budget is devoted to “keeping the lights on,” leaving little room for cuts. But we can show you how to simplify and refocus your IT, strengthening your organization to pursue your most promising business priorities. Our approach is both holistic and customizable. We can drive results in the short-term while producing sustainable savings through increased productivity and efficiency. Let us help you cultivate the transparent cost management discipline you need in order to execute your digital strategy.

Cybersecurity

Large companies are subject to millions of cyberattacks each month. That’s why tactical improvements aren’t enough. Our Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment helps you develop a strategy to fend off most attacks and recover quickly from any that might succeed.

As cybercrime becomes ever more prevalent—this year it’s expected to account for $6 trillion in losses, making it more profitable than the entire global trade in illegal drugs—it’s imperative that C-suite leaders champion a cybersecurity strategy that is robust enough to repel the vast majority of attacks, and ensures the organization is resilient enough to quickly recover from any that succeed.

Technology Delivery Assurance

Gain a new level of confidence that your large-scale tech transformation projects will succeed. Our structured approach helps you anticipate issues, mitigate risks, and make the right decisions to achieve your goals.

Most large technology transformations struggle to deliver the anticipated results. In a recent survey we found that only 12% of companies said they achieved or exceeded the ambition they set for their program. More often they encounter disappointment as delays and prohibitive costs diminish the potential benefits.

Technology Delivery Assurance solves this all-too-common problem by providing a comprehensive health check across 22 dimensions, ensuring a constant bridge to strategy, effective C-level communication and prompt issue resolution through high-impact interventions.

We help you balance core IT challenges (vendor selection, system customization, technology procurement and system rollout) with the equally critical business imperatives of process redesign, organization design, incentive realignment and training.

Technology Delivery Assurance is a repeatable, evidence-based approach that provides:

·     An independent and strategic viewpoint—We are vendor– and system-integrator–agnostic; we focus only on achieving your strategic objectives.

·     A constant bridge between your transformation initiative and your business strategy—We combine strategic vision (addressing the what and why) with delivery excellence (the how).

·     Fact-based recommendations—We work closely with the delivery teams, using surveys and stakeholder interviews to analyze risks and root causes of problems.

Technology Merger Integration

Technology integration is a critical element of any merger or acquisition—and one of the most daunting. We help you avoid risks and transform this challenge into a significant source of deal value and competitive advantage.

Technology issues can make or break deal value. As deals become more complex technology integration becomes critically important, yet it's often an aspect of integration that is under-resourced--and in which costs can quickly spiral out of control.

Our extensive experience in IT consulting and technology integrations has highlighted a few "golden rules":

·     70% of technology integrations fail in the beginning, not the end

·     There is a lot of money at stake: More than 50% of business synergies are technology-enabled

·     A clear cost-management process is required to avoid cost proliferation throughout the integration

We bring a strategic lens to post-merger technology integration. Acting as your general contractor, we work closely with your team to tackle the most critical technology priorities while keeping the most important strategic questions front-and-center.

Everyone’s buzzing about web3 and the metaverse, but what are the real-world implications for your business? We can help you find the answers.