01
Strategy Outcomes
Turning strategy into delivery: whether you have built your strategy internally, worked with another firm, or want us to build it with you, the hard part is making it happen.
Value chain thinking
The Value Loop
Most firms improve one link. We align all seven.
Value chain management at VCM starts from the established value chain model and applies the team’s combined experience through a different lens, connecting the dots across every part of a business so that strategy actually delivers value.
01 / The starting point
Start with value, not a definition
Value means something different to every organisation. Value can be customer value, financial value, employee value, social and ethical value, or operational value. Understanding what value means for you comes first; everything else follows from there.
01Customer value
02Financial value
03Employee value
04Social and ethical value
05Operational value
02 / A wider view
What value chain thinking means
It is a strategic approach that focuses on understanding, optimising and integrating all the activities involved in delivering value to customers. It goes beyond individual processes or departments, emphasising how different functions and capabilities interact to create competitive advantage and improve efficiency.
03 / The centrepiece
Seven stations, one connected view
Every part of the business has a bearing on the value it delivers. The loop keeps those relationships visible.
The loop is continuous. Each station informs the next, and the last one feeds the first.
02
Data, Technology & Innovation
The right data and the right tools, chosen and built to make your strategy measurable, and to tell you when the strategy itself needs to change.
03
Supply Chain Management
Suppliers treated as influences on your strategy rather than just a cost line, including the compliance, regulatory and funding realities that surround them.
04
Customer Centric
Working back from what customers actually want and will pay for, so every other part of the chain is pointing at the same target.
05
People & Change
Building the internal capability and capacity to lead the change, because change is delivered by your people, not by ours.
06
Business Operations & Excellence
Designing operations to reflect strategy, external and internal dependencies, people and technology, so the business delivers what customers actually pay for.
07
Control Management
A continuous improvement discipline for monitoring and managing the whole business, not just internal controls.
04 / Start where it matters
Enter the loop anywhere
The concept is complex, and it does not have to start at strategy. A client can start from a programme, a project, a system, a supplier problem or a customer issue, and VCM works backwards and forwards from that point to deliver value.
Wherever you are, we can start there.
05 / External forces
Suppliers and customers: the two external forces
Supply Chain Management and Customer Centric are the two external factors that most influence whether a strategy can be delivered. VCM treats them as the two sides pressing on the strategy, and works to keep them in line with it.
Supply Chain Management
The partners, obligations and constraints around the organisation’s ability to deliver.
Customer Centric
The needs and expectations that give every other decision a clear direction.
06 / What VCM builds
Capability, not products
VCM is a capability-led organisation. We do not sell products; we sell capability, and our competences are the thing we are proudest of. Our measure of success is that capability being embedded in the client, so they succeed without us.
For some clients VCM also provides specialist services that sit outside its core competences.
07 / The difference
How it differs from traditional thinking
Unlike siloed approaches that improve one department or capability at a time, value chain thinking is built on cross-functional collaboration and considers the wider impact of decisions across the entire chain. It is used in business transformation, supply chain management and digitalisation strategies.
Origin note
The thinking originates from the established value chain model, set out in Competitive Advantage (1985), and is applied here through a different lens, shaped by the team’s combined experience across global consultancies.