The consulting industry is developing rapidly all over the world. According to relevant data, there are nearly 7,000 companies engaged in management consulting in Germany. In Britain, 80% of large and medium-sized enterprises employ consulting companies all the year round to provide them with advice on strategy, organization, management, production and information technology. The services of American consulting companies cover management, technology, engineering, finance and other aspects. Because consulting companies have unique advantages in information system, professional talents and technical analysis, more and more enterprises cannot do without consulting industry. Facing the fully mature foreign consulting industry, China's consulting industry is still quite "young". According to statistics, there are more than 30,000 consulting companies in China, but only 1500 are really engaged in consulting services, and only a few are big brands in the consulting industry. A person from the Marketing Bureau of the State Economic and Trade Commission said that the consulting market in China is still far from perfect, and quite a few consulting companies are backward in collecting information, mainly relying on traditional methods such as door-to-door investigation, telephone interview and table statistics. The accuracy and timeliness of collected information are not high, so it is difficult to provide systematic, accurate and timely decision-making information for enterprises. In addition, China's consulting industry lacks talents, specialized training institutions and compound talents who are familiar with enterprise operation. There are also consulting companies that can't protect the intellectual property rights of enterprises well, and the consulting scheme is used beyond the scope and even stolen by other enterprises.
Most consulting companies are not professional, lack of processing skills for the collected information, and provide them to enterprises intact. Other consulting companies lack self-discipline and charge exorbitant prices, which tarnishes the reputation of consulting companies and affects the development of local consulting industry. A researcher from the Institute of Finance and Trade, China Academy of Social Sciences, who has been engaged in the research of service trade for a long time, said that China's management consulting lacks accurate market positioning, the management of the whole industry is weak, and the consulting companies are small and scattered. Even in Shenzhen, where the domestic consulting industry is developing rapidly, their consulting companies mainly focus on primary business such as marketing training, brand cultivation and product agency, and rarely involve more advanced consulting business such as enterprise strategy and information decision-making. The high-profit market was naturally given to foreign consulting companies. Although foreign consulting companies have taken the lead in the consulting industry, their high fees and ignorance of China's actual national conditions constitute the fatal weakness of foreign consulting companies. According to insiders, due to the segmentation of China market, the businesses of local consulting companies and foreign consulting companies basically do not overlap. The business of local consulting companies is generally small, and the service requirements are complex and special, so foreign consulting companies may not be able to do it well. Therefore, local consulting companies have enough time to accumulate business experience and shape their brands. At the same time, China is a very big market.
There are more than 6,543,800+million enterprises with annual sales/kloc-0,000, and more than 30,000 enterprises with annual sales of 50 million. If these enterprises carry out consulting business according to the normal proportion of 5%, it will be enough to make the consulting industry in China full and grow rapidly. More than 95% of enterprises in China belong to small and medium-sized enterprises. What enterprises need most in the development process is management consulting. Therefore, domestic small and medium-sized enterprises are the most potential market for consulting industry.
It is understood that in the past, the main customers of foreign consulting companies were mostly multinational companies, and the implementation of consulting programs was more or less based on western enterprise standards, while the China market was special, which was unfavorable to foreign consulting companies. Therefore, in the cooperation with China enterprises, foreign consulting companies also failed. Foreign consulting companies have noticed this and started to attract "returnees" who know both the western corporate strategy and China's national conditions to join their cause.
Facing the favorable situation of China's entry into WTO, consulting industry will develop rapidly, and as a knowledge-intensive industry, consulting industry will play an increasingly prominent role in economic life.
A new consulting mode represented by micro-consulting network was born.
With the decreasing role of tools and best practice consulting, there is a growing demand for fragmented consulting with business insight. In the eyes of a group of truly consulting business experts, the value of saving the world is gradually becoming the mainstream. They are not only from management consulting companies, but also from executives of well-known domestic enterprises.
Under such market demand and trend, a new consulting model represented by micro-consulting came into being.
The concept of micro-consulting was put forward by Beijing Weishi Wei Zhi Company on 20 12. This is a new mode of crowdsourcing consultation, which appears in the form of a platform to build an hourly consulting service platform for these business experts.
Thanks to the characteristics of the platform, the field of micro-consulting services is broader, including the evolution of trends represented by e-commerce and big data; Investment and financing determine the future enterprise form represented by M&A; Scientific management represented by strategy, comprehensive risk, supply chain and IT planning; Enterprise asset management represented by brand operation and crisis management; The ideological system of "touching the human soul" represented by eastern and western philosophy. High-level experts, including the vice president of Lenovo Group and the founder of a famous domestic consulting company, have formed a highland of wisdom in China. According to the institutional background, consulting institutions are divided into four categories:
1, academic. The team, which is mainly composed of scholars, experts and students from domestic universities, once became the main body of local management consulting. They tend to do theoretical research and are used to providing some general solutions for enterprises. This goes against the expectation of the actual demand of management consulting to some extent. However, their important contribution as "missionaries" of management knowledge and management ideas is undeniable.
2. Foreign schools and returnees. Mainly multinational consulting companies enter the China market, and their motives are: on the one hand, the attraction of China market, on the other hand, to provide services for old customers in China market. We believe that returnees are also a branch of foreign schools. They are mainly MBA graduates who have returned from overseas and senior managers who have left multinational consulting companies and foreign companies to start businesses. They all inherited western management concepts and methods and have mature business models.
3. actual combat. Commonly known as Daoyuan, it is mainly composed of teams with rich professional theoretical knowledge and rich management practice experience. Most of them graduated from famous universities in China and have been engaged in management work in enterprises for a long time, and they have some understanding of the application of management theory in practice. Some of them are clients of multinational consulting companies and are inspired by advanced management consulting results. They "learn war in war", and the main theories and methods in operation come from years of practice accumulation and study.
4. Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, represented by the expert team of micro-consulting network, is the synthesis of the first three. Among them, the main body of management consulting providers is no longer a full-time consultant who works alone in consulting companies, but consists of executives with practical trading experience in domestic large, medium and small enterprises and independent consultants who have achieved certain results. These include Dr. Hampton Consulting, vice president of Lenovo Group, Mr. Zhang Qi, a marketing consulting company cooperating with Ruidong Zhicheng, Ms. Bai Xiaowen of Nestle China, Dr. Gao, former senior vice president of Xinhua News, former president of AMT Consulting Company and Mr. Peng, former president of Win Business Consulting, and many other state-owned and private enterprise executives. With the rich experience and background of micro-consulting network experts, the needs of consultants can be better met, and the payment model of small units is more acceptable to consultants. According to the hierarchy and evolutionary logic, management consulting can be divided into ideological, technical and methodological types.
1, Thought Company:
Management consulting is mainly a service process of applying management ideas and technologies to practical guidance. But at the same time, practice should act on consultation itself, so that it can produce wisdom crystallization and theoretical sublimation, thus forming new management ideas. It can be said that the process of the formation of management thoughts is the process of the emergence of new management masters. For example, the pursuit of Excellence formed the corporate culture theory and created the Mr. Piotr Tomasz of McKinsey. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) created Kaplan, others such as learning organization and Peter Senge.
Ideological companies are suitable for enterprises facing major management changes, and new management ideas can effectively guide enterprise practice. At the same time, there is a risk of acclimatization in management thought.
2. Technology companies:
In order to apply the new management concept to practice, it must evolve into specific management technology, such as realizing the management concept of "broadband salary" through scientific "post evaluation" technology. Therefore, the operation mode of technical consulting companies is often streamlined, that is, there is only one set of standardized tools, and every industry uses this set of standardized tools to tell enterprises the answer. Consultants are used to sorting things out with the framework in their minds, prescribing prescriptions and drawing solutions for enterprises with their own established models, but enterprises have their own personality characteristics, and they often behave out of place in the process of "sorting out".
The performance in the consultation process is that the customer can't turn the plan into practical action. Successful management can't be transplanted successfully, and their rich case base and expert resources sometimes can't provide added value for customers.
Technology-based companies are more suitable to solve very clear problems of enterprises, such as the technical problems of HR, but technical consultation often evades the problem of technology application, but shirks it to the decision-making problems of enterprises.
Technology companies are the main players in the domestic market. According to our survey results, 87% of consulting companies in Beijing belong to this type. Because the product itself is technology, homogenization competition is serious. Especially in the field of human resources consulting, everyone just sells templates, such as the job evaluation technology of HAY and CRG, so there will be dozens of human resources consulting reports of a well-known consulting company put together, and almost only the strange phenomenon of different customer names appears. In corporate culture, most people are eager for quick success and instant benefit, taking consultation as the center and money as the radius, rather than taking money as the center and consulting as the radius.
3. French company:
As mentioned above, management consulting is mainly a service process of applying management ideas and technologies to practical guidance. The service object of management consulting is single, and each scheme is highly personalized and tailored according to the needs of the object.
Secondly, the results must be complete and systematic materialized products, such as consulting reports and data analysis models, rather than pure management ideas and technologies, let alone suggestions or ideas; At the same time, the measure of service quality is the operability of the results, and the output to customers is not theory, knowledge and technology, but practical solutions;
In addition, the development of management consulting business generally requires consultants and corresponding business personnel of enterprises to form a project team and form a close partnership for both parties to seek answers together; The generation of a good management consulting scheme should be interactive. In other words, the whole plan should be based on full and extensive communication between the two sides, not behind closed doors. This kind of interaction includes not only communication and understanding with senior managers, but also communication and understanding with middle-level and grass-roots managers, reaching a standard of understanding, and then evaluating alternative schemes according to this standard, and finally drawing the final scheme.
This is the so-called "cutting". Only in this way can we ensure the operability of the scheme, and only the scheme with strong operability can bring real value and significance to the enterprise. It can be said that a poorly executed scheme has no added value to the enterprise, can not create value for the enterprise, and even is misleading and a waste of human and financial resources.
Methods The company is the core demand after the consulting market matures.