“When we collaborate with leading organizations, we unlock more and better value for our clients,” says McKinsey partner Liz Ericson. “It’s as simple as that.”
Liz and senior partner Peter Dahlstrom co-lead McKinsey’s open ecosystem of alliances and acquisitions, a dynamic and continuously evolving group of leading organizations—including AWS, Google, Microsoft, and SAP—that helps our clients keep up with the rapid pace of change and stay resilient in times of uncertainty.
The open ecosystem today comprises more than 500 external-organization members and more than 20 acquired companies. According to Peter, it allows us to seamlessly collaborate with cutting-edge technology providers, leading platforms, system integrators, and implementation experts to bring even greater end-to-end impact to organizations at the front lines of change.
“McKinsey’s open ecosystem of alliances and acquisitions provides an unparalleled offering, and it is one important ingredient in our ability to partner with our clients for end-to-end impact,” says Peter. “The impact our ecosystem has generated is already compelling—and we are accelerating our journey.”
For example, we worked with AWS to help a global pizza company develop an e-commerce platform and establish a digital team that increased customer conversion by 40 percent, customer satisfaction by 15 percent, and reduced downtime to zero.
We partnered with Google Cloud to help one of our global logistics clients increase their supply-chain forecasting accuracy by building an advanced analytics platform to better predict order volumes.
By utilizing Microsoft’s IoT platform, we helped a wireless equipment manufacturer build a “factory of the future,” delivering a use-case strategy, roadmap, and industrial IoT platform in 16 weeks.
And working with SAP, we helped a multinational consumer-packaged goods organization transform their supply chain through tech-enabled autonomous planning. The program reduced inventory by 27 percent, and manual work by 60 percent, by consolidating over 100 data sources into one. It also increased the forecast accuracy by six to ten percent and reaction speed by 400 percent.
Ecosystem of Alliances and Acquisitions
Those are just a few cases that illustrate what our collaborations can do. In addition, we work with hundreds of collaborators who bring specific and relevant capabilities across every industry and function where we serve clients. Meanwhile, we’re also active in the acquisition space, seeking out strategic, high-caliber organizations that rapidly bolster our internal capabilities, accelerate our pace of innovation, and scale the value and impact we create for clients
Our most recent acquisitions include Candid, a leader in cloud consulting that has enabled us to rapidly scale our technical capabilities and accelerate the rate at which we help our clients capture concrete business value from cloud adoption. Candid helps McKinsey clients end-to-end: developing initial strategies and business cases through to designing architecture, migrating applications, and optimizing workloads.
Vivid Economics, a strategic economics consultancy with broad sustainability and macroeconomic capabilities, also recently joined McKinsey. Today, the Vivid team helps our clients navigate the urgent implications of climate change and transform towards net-zero carbon emissions. This includes assessing climate and nature-related risk; developing environmentally and socially sustainable strategies; and creating value through sustainable transformations.
The impact our ecosystem has generated is already compelling—and we’re only just starting our journey.
And Orpheus, an innovator in digital procurement and spend analytics, means McKinsey can now unlock the value hidden in clients’ purchasing data. It combines an advanced platform technology with McKinsey’s industry expertise and content-rich services in digital procurement to offer clients a software as a service (SaaS) product that provides solutions that suit their specific requirements.
“By combining our own capabilities with those of our alliances and acquisition partners,” says Liz, “we know that the expertise we are bringing to clients—whether it’s large-scale data transformations, the latest in technology solutions, or paving the way for a net-zero future—leads to greater impact.”