BrazilR&G Global Consultants opens office in China, third in Asia
Operations and supply chain consultancy R&G Global Consultants has expanded into China. The firm’s new office in Beijing is, following India and Thailand, R&G’s third in Asia and 15th globally.
“R&G has already been providing its services throughout the Asia Pacific (APAC) region in recent years, including in China. With the opening of our office in Beijing, we can now intensify our services in the country and region,” explained Aart Willem de Wolf, a Managing Partner at R&G Global Consultants.
China’s management consulting market has been booming in recent years, with double-digit growth booked in both 2016 and 2017. The country – combined with Hong Kong and Mongolia – accounts for around one fifth of Asia Pacific’s consulting industry, which is valued at $50 billion.
The segment in which R&G Global Consultants operates, operations and supply chain management, is the largest service area in China by some distance, and is on the back of growing demand touted to provided consultants in the field with a host of transformation opportunities. Across industries, organisations are embracing emerging technologies to optimise their internal operations, while leveraging more agile and efficient processes to enhance their client offering. Meanwhile, in industrial industries – China’s economy still leans more heavily on manufacturing sectors as opposed to services sectors – executives are adopting the likes of internet of things, robotics, artificial intelligence, industry 4.0 and more to transform operating strategies and models.
To establish and build out its position in the Chinese landscape, R&G Global Consultants has brought Boon How Chong on board, appointed Managing Partner for Greater China. The country leader brings 15 years’ experience as a founding partner of Beijing-based Berkeley Henderson Consulting to R&G’s footprint, along with 20 years of quality management and process improvement experience with other organisations, including Acer, Hewlett Packard and Motorola.
Commenting on his new challenge, Boon How Chong said,“I am very excited to be part of the R&G and look forward to further expand its professional services to reach clients in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. With ‘Enable Your Success’ as my personal motto, I very much enjoy developing clients’ management teams, operational staff and other employees, energising and strengthening their subconscious mindsets to pursue performance excellence in themselves and for their organisation.”
He added that the focus will initially lean toward customers in the manufacturing space. “Being a world manufacturing house, China is the leading exporter of manufacturing products globally. Our vision is to become the consulting partner of our client's manufacturing operations in China.” Expertise areas R&G is specialised in include Kaizen, Six Sigma, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), Lean Production, Just in time Production, Supply Chain Management, Organisation Re-structuring, Process Optimisation, Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) Reduction and Performance Excellence. In working with clients, Boon How highlighted that the firm work shoulder by shoulder with its client on realising tangible returns – “we measure our achievements through KPIs developed at critical processes points identified for improvements.”
International footprint
Christian Mertz, Managing Partner of R&G Global Consultants France & Switzerland, added that he is delighted with the firm’s latest addition, stating; “our new Chinese office exemplifies R&G’s rapidly expanding international footprint”. The move comes two years after R&G made a foray into Denmark with an office in Copenhagen, while in the year prior to that, new hubs were launched in Brazil (Sao Paulo) and Thailand (Bangkok). Meanwhile, in December last year the operations consultancy won a large contract in Saudi Arabia.
In the past months, two other international consulting firms – Q5 (UK headquartered) and Simon-Kucher & Partners (Germany headquartered) – made similar ventures into Greater China: Simon-Kucher launched an office in Shanghai, its third in the region, while Q5 opened a Hong Kong office with a long-game approach.
According to a recent report by Source global Research, the key for any consulting firm to succeed in China is having a tailored local approach. De Wolf said that R&G’s partner team recognised this feature, with Boon How “bringing a wealth of consulting and local market expertise to the table.”
R&G Global Consultants was founded in 2004 by a team of former managers at General Electric who specialised in six sigma. Since, the company has grown to a mid-sized international specialist with a track record of more than 1,000 programmes and projects at 200+ major companies in various industries. The consulting firm is headquartered in the Netherlands.
