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For more than 20 years, Sia Partners Australia (formerly Churchill Consulting) has been helping organisations transform and design their future. We have a proven track record of developing strategies and implementing programs that have delivered real and lasting change to organisations in Australia.
With our head office in Perth, we also have consultants across Australia and access to the Sia Partners global network and industry expertise. Our highly qualified and trusted team brings world-leading methodologies and thinking to deliver business and digital transformation solutions.
We are known for building strong and long-lasting relationships with our clients and bringing a strong mix of innovation and pragmatism to solve our client’s biggest issues, challenges, and ambitions.
Challenges look different when viewed from the right perspective. We help you rethink the future of your organisation by taking a highly strategic and fresh approach to your goals and driving outcomes that deliver real impact, from transformation to sustainable growth.
Real transformation requires smart and tailored delivery and implementation. We have a strong track record in using a tailored approach to support your project delivery and ensuring the success of complex organisational transformational programs.
We partner with you to formulate and deliver complex technology and transformation initiatives. Our goal is to ensure you optimise your business outcomes through the strategic use of technology and fit-for-purpose deployment models that support sustainable operations.
MACA is a publicly listed international contracting group providing services to the Australian and Asian mining and construction industries. Headquartered in Western Australia, MACA operates in a fast-moving and highly sophisticated industry and is always looking for ways to ensure its operations are optimised.
MACA’s significant business divisions are focused on core mining contracting services, alongside civil and infrastructure works. These sectors have been experiencing rapid growth and high activity, fuelled by increased infrastructure spending during the pandemic and the need to keep the economy moving throughout this period. As a result of the increased demand for its services, MACA identified the need for the right technology to support its growth, and that could be leveraged across the organisation, quickly, and at scale. Sia Partners was engaged to work with MACA’s business divisions to build a pragmatic and implementable strategy and architecture to revamp the availability of technology across the business divisions.
Working closely with stakeholders from each of the business divisions, we focused on applying a strong strategic lens to MACA’s cross-functional technological needs to ensure all decisions were fit for the long term. We helped MACA to formulate and achieve its vision to enable sustainable business growth and expansion in a simple, integrated and secure way, supported by fit-for-purpose solutions.
Our process included:
Discovery
Strategic Intent
Transition Plan
Execution Program
The exercise provided MACA with a clear plan and targeted architecture to build a contemporary, fit-for-purpose, and agile platform to support the cross-functional needs of the business, and improve operations. Through this engagement, MACA was able to maximise the adoption of strategic enterprise-wide platforms, increase the speed of digitisation of front-line operations, align the organisation and deliver maximum value from their technology investments.
Due diligence to support the expansion of operations through the acquisition
With the mining industry enjoying a strong period of growth, we assisted our mining client to supercharge its organic growth through a targeted merger and acquisition.
Our client, a large international mining contractor, wanted to support their mandate for growth by expanding their operations through the acquisition of a competitor. With multiple businesses and operations across four continents, the strategic acquisition would add new capability, significantly grow market share in the Australian market and take the business in a new strategic direction. Churchill was engaged when management recognised it needed expert help with the task of evaluating the opportunity.
Our client needed to effectively assess the quality of the target’s operations, sales pipeline, management team, and systems, while simultaneously agreeing on a valuation that accounted for synergies and integration costs. Adding to the complexity, upcoming public reporting commitments meant the acquisition due diligence exercise needed to be completed in a fraction of the normal time frame.
We leveraged our Post-Merger Integration playbook and years of experience managing integrations for large and complex organisations to deliver robust due diligence, all in a matter of weeks. Due to the time restrictions, a Churchill team was rapidly mobilised to run the program management office (PMO) for the due diligence exercise, quantify synergies and develop an integration plan for the combined entities. Our approach was to bolster the management team with skilled resources to deliver an exceptional outcome and included the facilitation of more than 40 governance meetings with workstream leads, third-party advisors, client executives, and Board members. Churchill supported multiple workstreams including Operational assessment; Finance & Tax assessment; Legal and Insurance assessment; Funding options, Integration & Synergies, Communications, and Valuation. Our PMO team partnered with our client across the project and with workstream owners to develop workstream plans and identify cross-dependencies. With synergy and integration cost estimates significant drivers of the overall valuation, Churchill applied our playbook to develop bottom-up synergy and integration estimates and compare them to other similarly sized integrations.
Following our compressed five-week due diligence exercise, the client submitted a successful offer to the target entity, with recognised synergies across Corporate Overheads, Financial & Capital, Operational, and Revenue Opportunities. The due diligence also delivered a detailed 15-month integration plan that included 550+ task integrations across communications and branding, organisational structure, technology change, people impacts, legal entity, insurance integration, and more. The organisation has since successfully leveraged the new acquisition to grow its market share during a time of industry growth.
When a mining services company looked to double its growth over a short time frame, Sia Partners was engaged to help the client work out how.
A medium-sized mining services manufacturing company based in Perth and servicing the Western Australia Load & Haul market developed an ambitious target to double its growth in three years, moving into different geographical markets, and finding new avenues for product growth.
While the client had ambitious growth targets, it did not have the detail as to how to achieve these targets. Sia Partners (formerly Churchill) was engaged to work with the client and develop this growth strategy, including realistic growth markets, geographies, and product/services.
Sia Partners engaged the client through a series of board and management interviews to understand the guardrails of possible growth options, including lessons learned from previous expansion plans.
We then undertook a strategic landscape review, including macroeconomic impacts on both supply and demand, potential product adjacencies, ability and appetite for geographic expansion as well as competitor assessment and addressable market sizing exercises.
A series of workshops, involving senior and operational management, were used to explore these opportunities across a traditional Ansoff Matrix:
These key themes were explored by product/service and distribution teams to identify and quantify possible opportunities. These opportunities were then assessed and prioritized against the ability to execute. Real-time scenario modeling was then undertaken to ensure accurate, pragmatic market share assumptions and outcomes could be reviewed in real-time and validated before being adopted.
The output of this work was the development of a clear growth strategy, with several adjacent markets identified where the client could serve. This resulted in a sizable new client being contracted.
The client also moved to new premises with new robotic manufacturing processes to ensure scalability and to further capitalize on an expansionary, profitable, sustainable growth trajectory.
Western Australia’s major electricity network operator, responsible for building, maintaining, and operating an electricity network that powers the lives of 2.3 million people, in the southwest of Western Australia.
As a result of major shifts in strategic context, arising from West Australia’s energy transition, a newly established 10-year corporate strategic direction reset, and significant augmentations to the operating structure of the organisation, Sia Partners was engaged to facilitate a fast-paced, integrated Business Unit Planning process across all of the client’s seven Business Units. The primary objective was to cascade the corporate strategy into the Business Units into relevant, actionable and achievable plans, whilst considering the implications on and dependencies with other Business Units.
A rapid 8-week planning and portfolio prioritisation process was developed by Strategy and Business Improvement teams to maximise buy-in from all areas of the business and build ownership of the problems facing the organisation, while also limiting disruption to BAU.
Focussed on delivering two major outcomes: firstly individual business unit planning across all seven business units, followed by integrated whole-of-business planning
We broke this approach into 3 phases: Frame, Develop, & Validate
Sia Partners worked with Western Australia's (WA) major port to identify a new purpose to set their future direction.
The Fremantle Ports Authority is responsible for managing the Port of Fremantle and the Kwinana Bulk Terminal, one of the key ports in WA for export and trade into Australia.
Container trade is currently the largest source of revenue for the Port. With the state government considering options around the future of container trade in WA, including potentially transferring it to a new purpose-built facility further south, the Fremantle Ports Authority (Fremantle Ports) found itself facing an uncertain future. Recognising a new approach was needed for the future, the organisation underwent an extensive renewal, with new appointments to the Board and Executive team. Sia Partners was engaged and asked Churchill to facilitate the development of a new strategy to take the organisation into the future, including identifying Fremantle Ports’ purpose.
Our first task was to help Fremantle Ports reframe its purpose to guide it into the future, and bring its key stakeholders on the change journey.
We were able to facilitate this by posing three questions:
The answers to these questions aided the development of a new, action-oriented purpose statement for the organisation that set the direction for the organisation into the future.
That action-orientated purpose had two elements:
Our approach and process for including and managing the stakeholders in the strategic reset included:
Fremantle Ports successfully engaged with its stakeholders and its reason for operation and direction for the future. The collaborative work that went into developing the purpose had several beneficial outcomes including:
A government-owned energy utility operating one of the world’s largest infrastructure networks in the southwest of Western Australia. It is responsible for building, maintaining, and operating an electricity network that powers the lives of 2.3 million people.
In 2021, the client developed a 10-year corporate strategy focused on ‘powering the lives of the community', ensuring customers would benefit from safe and reliable energy well into the future. The strategy outlined an evolution to a modular grid that would support the decarbonisation of WA’s local economy while supporting jobs and growth. We were approached by the client’s largest business unit, Asset Operations, which needed a new business plan to fulfill the corporate strategy and tackle the challenges of the energy transition. Sia Partners was engaged to drive the development of a three-year plan (FY 23/25). Advice and support were also sought to manage implementation, including change management, communication, and the effective mobilisation of internal capabilities.
We ran three phases of work: Discovery; Planning; and Pre-Delivery in partnership with the Operations Improvement team.
The Asset Operations 3-year business plan kicked off in July 2022 and is running as planned. The governance structure developed is successfully guiding the team, and a select number of strategic initiatives have already been accelerated and strategic initiatives requiring minor expenditures have progressed to delivery, with other initiatives undertaking enterprise-wide portfolio prioritisation and capital allocation to proceed to delivery.
When Australia’s largest agricultural co-operative wanted to ensure its governance arrangements were fit for purpose, Sia Partners was engaged to guide the review process.
CBH Group is Australia’s largest cooperative organisation having generated revenue of $4.19 billion and $5 billion in assets in 2019. It is owned by approximately 3,900 Western Australian grain-growing businesses. Since its establishment in 1933, CBH’s core purpose has been to sustainably create and return value to its grower members.
To ensure that the CBH’s Board governance arrangements remained fit for purpose and aligned to CBH strategy and contemporary best practices, the cooperative embarked on a major Board Governance Review. The Governance Review also needed to improve the engagement of growers and to ensure that recommendations were informed by their opinions. Sia Partners (formally Churchill) was engaged to conduct the Governance Review, including assisting the Board in designing and implementing a clear roadmap of key governance changes.
We designed the Board Governance Review for CBH based on key success factors of strong Board commitment and alignment, as well as education and communication of members. Through structured interviews with the Board and Executives, interviews with peer co-operative from around the world, and research into governance best practices, we developed facts and insights to inform our recommendations on governance changes. These facts supported the recommendations that were agreed upon with the Board and ultimately brought to members for their input. Both quantitative and qualitative sentiments from members were used to gauge the appetite for change as well as preferences for the design of specific changes.
Our team planned a series of workshops and focus groups with the Board, members, and other stakeholders to maintain clear and transparent communications, building strong working relationships to manage divergent options and views. In addition, we worked closely with the Steering Committee and Sponsors to construct change options and carefully plan communications messaging and activities, particularly for areas that were more complex or would result in greater impacts on directors and the member base.
The result of the review was a strong Board consensus on significant changes to policies, rules, and practices covering aspects of candidate nominations and elections, director term and tenure, board size and composition, and board diversity. Through the engagement process, governance changes proposed were aligned to grower sentiment, and several changes required final support from members at a subsequent annual general meeting.
With a member-based financial services organisation looking to invest in its Digital Platforms, Sia Partners was bought in to ensure the project enabled scale and value.
Capricorn Society is a 45-year-old membership cooperative providing finance, travel and business protection services, and other services to its members, trading on their collective power to get better outcomes.
Capricorn Society wanted to make a significant investment in operationalising and maximising the value of its investments in Digital Platforms. Sia Partners (formally Churchill) was asked to support Capricorn by designing a blueprint for adopting agile as an operational model at scale, across its member value streams such as member communications and member loyalty.
Working closely with stakeholders and the digital, IT, and other teams, we:
Sia Partners assisted a large chain of privately owned hospitals in Australia to develop a digital transformation operating model, execute their digital strategy, and set them up for long-term success.
With hospitals and clinics across Australia, St John of God Health Care is one of the largest privately owned health and allied services in Australia.
St John of God Health Care was undergoing reorganisation to address gaps within the enabling functions of the business. It wanted to improve its digital maturity and capabilities to support the future business model and industry opportunities. Sia Partners was asked to assist in designing a revised Digital & Technology function that would play an important role in supporting the current and future organisation strategy, and providing an end-to-end capability for business transformation. A business case was required to validate the use of significant resources over a number of years, and that would substantially improve their operations.
In order to ensure St John of God was taking the right approach to its digital transformation, we took a thorough and staged approach to assessing both the current state and what would work for the future.
Through a series of workshops, stakeholder meetings, and independent analysis, over eight weeks we:
The result was a detailed design and plan for the function with a high degree of clarity and ownership of the change by senior leaders who had bought into the process.
We helped St John of God deliver and implement:
When the Royal Flying Doctors needed a new operating model to improve its clinical operations, Sia Partners was asked to review what a successful business opportunity could look like across multiple stakeholders, and plan the transition.
Royal Flying Doctors Service Western Operations (RFDS WO), is the Western Australian arm of the national RFDS body. RFDS WO delivers health services across rural and remote locations, transporting patients to clinical care. It also services commercial clients – predominantly the resources sector. In one year alone, RFDS WO flew over 9 million km to retrieve and assist 10,000 patients.
The RFDS WO had identified symptoms of an inefficient clinical operating model. Clinical operations, covering doctors and nurses, clinical service delivery capabilities, governance, and interacting with other parts of the RFDS WO organisation, were exhibiting significant workforce fatigue and disconnect. This was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sia Partners Australia was engaged by RFDS WO to review its clinical operating model and identify the root causes of the symptoms. Sia Partners was also asked to develop a near-term clinical target operating model, and the associated initiatives to implement, and to identify guiding principles for what a medium-term target clinical operating model should address.
Sia Partner’s engagement was split into three phases of work: Discovery, Design, and Planning.
Throughout the process Sia Partners engaged with multiple forums, including the RFDS WO Board and clinical-focused advisory council, to obtain input and present progress.
The result was a concise and well-defined list of clinical operating model initiatives, packaged into a detailed program of work. The program to deliver the near-term clinical operating model is currently underway with RFDS independently reviewing the needs and resourcing required to undertake the initiatives and implement the change required. A high-level view of the medium-term clinical operating model was also delivered, with design principles defined, preliminary initiatives identified and a next steps plan carefully considered and communicated.
The Perth Mint is Australia’s largest fully integrated precious metals enterprise, providing premium gold, silver, and platinum products and services to markets throughout the world. Owned by the government of Western Australia, the Mint is run by Gold Corporation, and has very high compliance requirements, with multiple stakeholders.
Sia Partners was engaged to define Perth Mint’s Technology Strategy and Operating Model and manage the delivery of the resulting digital transformation program, with the aim of improving the customer experience and the technology underpinning and supporting the Mint’s operations.
This was a long-term project with several key milestones. During the project delivery, the Sia Partners team was embedded into the Mint, building strong relationships with the internal stakeholders and also other technology partners involved.
The following key activities and deliverables were for the program of works:
Following the development of its digital transformation strategy, the Perth Mint moved into the implementation phase, retaining the services of Sia Partners to help deliver on the digital transformation alongside other partners. The strategy successfully aligned the technological directions to the Perth Mint’s long-term strategic plan, built a strong business case, and developed an internal operations model to support the implementation and post-implementation phases. The strategy has helped the Perth Mint to transform its customer experience and drive organisational change through an effective and efficient Operating Model and underlying architecture.
Perth Airport is the main hub in Western Australia. In the Perth Airport structure, Directors are owners’ representatives, and ultimately make the key investment decisions on large-scale strategic projects such as major capital works programs.
Following a large-scale corporate restructure and the implementation of a new strategy, Perth Airport sought Sia Partner’s expertise to conduct a strategy execution review to ensure its new approach put them on track to becoming Australia’s Western Hub. The strategy review was a significant undertaking, requiring internal and external evaluation, context gathering, and distillation to identify progress and highlight any need for redirection. The review also needed to take into account the complexity of the business operations and its ownership structure.
A blended team of Sia Partners, Perth Airport Executives, and Senior Management was brought together to lead strategy development, strategic modeling, and support strategy execution. Working side-by-side with the Perth Airport team, we helped to identify key shifts in specific landscapes and develop corporate strategic initiatives and action plans. To ensure impact against key performance indicators, we worked closely with the finance team to refresh strategic modeling, providing quantitative analysis on the impact strategic initiatives will have on Perth Airport’s Enterprise Valuation up to 2040. This was supplemented with an extensive detailed review of strategy execution and the Airport’s Enterprise Project Management operations. The Board was engaged via strategic deep-dive conversations with the Perth Airport Management Team around key initiatives and their impacts, to obtain a commitment from investors to fund the major initiatives contained in the strategy.
This information-gathering piece allowed Perth Airport to review the information at hand and take a holistic view of opportunities. This resulted in a refreshed strategy for Perth Airport, with ambitious targets set over multiple time horizons and supporting action plans required to execute the initiatives contained within the strategy. The Perth Airport Board endorsed the refreshed strategy and an in-principal agreement was delivered to fund major capital works and Airport estate development programs, forecast at over a billion dollars over the next decade.
When a global logistics firm needed to transform its ways of working, Sia Partners was asked to help improve its operations, taking a design thinking approach.
A global logistics firm with large multi-year, multi-million-dollar service contracts, the client had operations spanning 40 sites in Australia, plus overseas.
Sia Partners (formerly Churchill) was engaged to improve the client’s management operating system, or ‘ways of working’. The goal was to foster a culture of performance improvement by designing a new way of working for operational and commercial teams, with data insights driving decision-making.
To meet the user-led design brief, Sia Partners deployed a 14-week design thinking process to activate over 45 operational and commercial representatives, across all levels of the business, a variety of operations, and across Australia.
A blended Sia Partners and client team led a design thinking process working through a series of stages:
Empathise > Define > Ideate > Prototype > Test
The approach was complemented by robust business readiness and change management. We had to minimise disruptions to day-to-day operations and engage site leaders so they could champion the pilot with their teams.
We leveraged strong senior leadership buy-in on the project to connect the Sponsors to the project with site visits and clear, consistent communications to bolster operators engaging in the design process.
To solve the problem of efficiency losses we built the management operating system (the new way of working) to:
Contract requirements and assumptions are now translated into an agreed standardised language and have successfully been embedded through new ways of working.
Teams are using the new system and using the outlined process to baseline their performance, and identifying strategic actions, to pursue targets using the new metrics and systems.
The management operating system is now being scaled across the rest of the national operations, with the new system deployed to all 40+ sites by the end of 2022, improving and transforming business operations.
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