Operating Model & Process Architecture

THE PROBLEM

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COOs commission an operating model redesign once an existing problem has become visible and costly — rarely as a theoretical exercise. The two most commonly cited triggers are efficiency and growth: operations have become slower, more expensive or less able to scale than the business now needs. Close behind is a structural symptom that’s easy to miss: decision rights and process ownership have become unclear or contested, producing slow, inconsistent decision-making that no amount of reporting fixes on its own. Processes inherited through growth, M&A or years of incremental change are rarely documented or controlled consistently — some steps over-controlled, others exposed to error with no detective control to catch it — and service levels, where they exist, aren’t measured or reported transparently. The result is higher cost of rework and support, inconsistent quality, and, increasingly, no structured foundation to build the ERP, automation or AI capability the business needs to stay competitive.

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​WHAT IS OPERATING MODEL & PROCESS ARCHITECTURE?

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Operating Model & Process Architecture closes that gap. An operating model is the structured description of how an organisation turns strategy into execution — its processes, organisation design, locations, systems and governance, defined precisely enough to run the business and to measure whether it’s working. Building one requires business analysis, requirements gathering and process mapping down to Level 4 — the detail needed to build ERP systems, automate workflows and prepare data for AI — built on a defined process taxonomy rather than left to inconsistent, offline interpretation.

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THE 600 CONSULTING APPROACH

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Designing a scalable target operating model demands specialist method — Lean, Six Sigma, process classification frameworks — and the independence to challenge how work has always been done. Structure follows the value chain, not the other way round: roles, spans of control, management layers and governance are derived from how work actually needs to flow, never assumed or fixed before that work is understood. Lean’s root-cause discipline is what makes this possible — rather than patching the pain point a business notices first, it works back to the structural cause, which is just as often found in the organisation around a process as in the process itself. That calls for boldness: a redesign that avoids the difficult structural change simply rebuilds the same problem in a new form. Every recommendation is quantified, with benefits defined and measured before, during and after delivery, and tracked through to realisation rather than left as a forecast.

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SERVICES

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• Target operating model design: translating strategic intent into a defined operating model — process, organisation, locations and systems — anchored in business analysis and requirements gathering, not assumption.

• AS-IS process architecture: capturing and validating how the organisation actually operates today, built on a structured process taxonomy, often providing a cross-country, cross-function business its first consistent view of operational reality.

• Value chain and TO-BE process design: redesigning the end-to-end value chain — the prime operational steps that deliver value — against an 80/20 principle of globalised processes with regional accommodations, built explicitly for efficiency, quality and right-first-time execution.

• Organisational design: structuring roles, spans of control, management layers and decision rights around that value chain, not independently of it, so accountability sits where the work actually happens and the organisation is capable of running the redesigned processes consistently.

• Controls and service-level design: mapping the right mix of preventative controls (stopping errors before they occur) and detective controls (catching what slips through) to each process, with service levels defined and performance reported transparently, so quality and risk are visible rather than assumed.

• Process governance: clear ownership, review cycles, version control and change pathways, with hand-offs designed to tighten integration with shared-service and support functions and reduce their cost to serve.

• Implementation and change management: sequencing delivery through a prioritised implementation roadmap — foundational change first, then quick wins that demonstrate progress and win hearts and minds, through to a continuous improvement pipeline — while embedding new ways of working using the Prosci ADKAR model: building Awareness of why the change is necessary, Desire to support it, the Knowledge to carry it out, the Ability to perform at the new standard, and Reinforcement through feedback and recognition so the new behaviours stick rather than reverting to the old way of working.

• AI-ready foundations: aligning process and data design with ERP, PIM, case management and automation tooling, so the architecture is ready to be built on, not just documented.

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​IN PRACTICE

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For a private equity-backed commercial real estate group operating across seven countries, this approach meant building a Level 4 AS-IS process architecture on a defined business taxonomy — the organisation’s first structured, cross-country view of its own operations — then redesigning 64 TO-BE processes from 81 across two core value chains, Value Realisation and Value Creation, with organisational governance, a data matrix and functional hand-off matrices built around that redesigned flow of work, not ahead of it. The result: a process foundation ready for ERP-led transformation and AI-enabled automation, built on Lean Six Sigma method and the Operating Model and Process Classification Frameworks developed over a career spanning Big Four consulting and independent practice.