As a prominent name within the industry, this Tier 1 supplier of high-quality fiber composite components for aerospace customers generated annual sales of more than 750 million euros before the coronavirus pandemic. During previous growth phases, the organization was expanded vertically, which significantly increased the existing structural costs. The initial goal of the project with Horváth was to sustainably reduce the company's fixed costs and thus lay the foundations for its planned future growth.

The company's strength lies in its customer focus and adaptability to customer requests. Although agility is "lived" throughout the business, in practice this had led to overlapping areas of responsibility, excessive coordination work, and massive redundancies within the organization. The core functions were not clearly defined and accountability among the various business units was something of a gray area. In addition, there was clear mistrust between departments, which resulted in many activities being duplicated.

In order to sustainably optimize the structural costs and increase the efficiency of the organization, functional areas such as purchasing, R&D, program management, HR, IT, finance, and production were all analyzed. The organizational structure as well as the personnel and overhead costs were transparently merged, and a benchmarking process was established for the focus areas. The consulting team analyzed key data and metrics across the company and worked with the managing board to quantify the goals of the cost-reduction initiative. The potential savings soon became apparent and the overarching goal was subdivided among the various departments accordingly.

Acceptance of the necessary changes by all stakeholders, from the CEO to the division managers, is an essential prerequisite for a successful cost transformation. The project team therefore developed the necessary measures to achieve the defined goals in consultation with the division managers. All stakeholders worked together to identify latent cross-departmental potential. The focus was on optimizing areas of responsibility and the associated processes across the various divisions and core functions. Outsourced areas were integrated, shareholdings sold, hierarchy levels reduced, management margins increased, and processes adapted. This eliminated both the high coordination costs and the internal redundancies. As a result of this process, more than 100 ideas for optimizing the structural costs emerged. Ultimately, these then created the impetus for a holistic transformation program.

The team was also able to achieve improvements in the indirect areas of logistics. The different collective agreements for aviation and logistics, and in some cases insufficiently standardized processes between the plants, presented a challenge. To address this, the consulting team conceptualized a detailed business case for the vertical integration of the logistics processes. This resulted in the creation of a competence center that manages important operational tasks for the numerous sites.