Case Study
Advising a private equity firm for driving portfolio company productivity in virtual operations
Benchmarking of best practices | Portfolio management | Competitive assessment
Business need
- With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a European private equity firm was facing several challenges due to the newly implemented virtual operations by its portfolio companies.
- In order to drive their smooth operations, it wanted to understand how its portfolio peers were managing their work during the pandemic.
- It wanted to derive learnings from their best practices and strategies to accelerate the remote work productivity.
To get insights on best practices and trends in remote operations related to the peer group of portfolio companies during the pandemic.
The client outlined two key reasons for selecting RocSearch:
- Our ability to rapidly deploy customised teams with the necessary skills.
- Our proven capabilities in peer benchmarking and flexible client-centric engagement models.
Approach and Methodology
- Our advisory team identified leading peers of the private equity firm in its six portfolio sectors, i.e., business services, consumer, financial services, healthcare, industrial and technology, media and telecom (TMT).
We assessed the disruption-led challenges for the peer group companies and the strategies adopted by them to manage their customers and supply chain.
- We identified several pain points for these companies related to remote operations such as difficulty in workforce re-modelling, increase in the number of cyber frauds, delayed client conversations, COVID-19-induced queries and deprioritising innovation projects.
- We then investigated the strategic as well as tactical initiatives they took up to overcome these challenges and drive productivity, such as providing equipment support, work-from-home allowances, introducing touchless access control and remote patient monitoring.
- Finally, we laid out various best practices adopted by these firms to manage and grow the businesses of the portfolio companies of the private equity firm. Some of these included accelerating digitalisation efforts, both for short-term and medium-term needs, managing network infrastructure and reinventing value proposition that drives more impact in a post-pandemic world.
Business Outcomes
- While the portfolio companies themselves were working hard to stay ahead in managing operational disruptions, the study allowed the management teams to benchmark their initiatives against market best practices.
- The insights from the study provided them learnings and a menu of options to review and optimise their strategies for improving their business operations during the pandemic.
The study allowed the management team to benchmark initiatives against market best practices, optimise strategies and improve business operations.
