True cost transformation is about simplifying, refocusing and strengthening your college or university so you can pursue growth and provide a better student experience. Our approach is both holistic and customizable, enabling you to cultivate, reward and continually improve a sustainable cost management culture.

Our Share Smarter, Serve Better approach helps you rethink what work gets done, how and by whom. The result: Your faculty and staff can focus their skills and energy on the work that matters most to your strategy - and do it faster, smarter and more efficiently.

It’s exciting times in shared services. Colleges and universities are evolving their vision of shared services from being a source of cost savings through scale to a source of competitive advantage and exceptional student and faculty experience.

Shared services organizations are becoming multi-functional. Leaders are finding more, often higher value services to centralize, upgrading analytics and insights, scaling automation, adopting Agile ways of working, and more consistently measuring student, faculty and staff satisfaction.

We partner with you to support the full shared services journey from strategy through transition and execution. We support institutions across the lifecycle, whether you are implementing shared services for the first time, migrating from dispersed, single function shared services to Shared Services Centers, or transforming the performance of your existing shared services to deliver more value to the business.

We bring a full range of capabilities, including delivery model redesign, process redesign, outsourcing, to help you achieve your goals. And most importantly, we help with the talent strategies and with change management to achieve the adoption of shared services by the institution necessary for success.

What to Expect

  • Accelerated growth: launch new programs faster
  • Better student, faculty and staff experience: improve service quality through standardization and automation
  • Lower costs: achieve 20%- 40% costs savings, getting a payback within 2 years of implementation.
  • New sources of talent: gain access to the skills and expertise you need to power your institution

Client Results

  • University of North Texas System

Outsourcing is at a turning point. Growth in as-a-service models, disruptive technologies such as cloud and automation, and new data security and privacy standards are a few of the forces disrupting traditional approaches to sourcing. We can help you navigate these forces and enhance your competitive position.

Outsourcing has transformed the way colleges and universities. We help institutions fully realize the promise of outsourcing while managing the risks.

For outsourcing, our capabilities span the full lifecycle from developing the sourcing strategy, partner selection, transition and ongoing governance to turning around or renegotiating under-performing outsourcing relationships.

Since we are independent and objective with no downstream implementation or outsourcing goals, you can rely on our counsel.

What to Expect

  • Lower cost: reduce costs through scale and national delivery
  • Improved service quality: standardize, simplify and automate processes
  • Flexibility and new capabilities: scale services up and down more quickly and gain access to new capabilities you currently lack
  • New sources of talent: tap into a more diverse and wider talent pool

Client Results

  • Abilene Christian University

Make sure that every dollar you spend serves your institution’s strategy. Zero-based budgeting creates an ownership mindset that reduces costs by 20 to 40% and keeps costs out.

A successful zero-based budgeting program relies on four repeatable components to achieve continuous cost improvement:

  • Target-setting based on granular KPIs
  • Driver-based budgets negotiated between dual owners of costs
  • Rigorous tracking and monitoring
  • Identification of a steady stream of savings initiatives and breakthrough ideas that challenge the status quo.

We have helped Private and Public colleges and universities successfully execute Zero- based Budgeting, freeing up, in some cases, millions of dollars to re-invest in the. When combined with zero-based redesign the impact can be even more transformative. In fact, when institutions use Zero- based Budgeting and Zero- based Redesign together they achieve savings of 25% or more for targeted functions and activities, since this combined approach extends the “clean-sheet” view of your school across your operating model, processes and workflows.

What to Expect

  • Gain confidence: Be certain that every dollar supports your strategic priorities
  • Change the cultuer: Instill an ownership mindset across the organization
  • Build new capabilities: Achieve continuous improvement by changing behaviors and ways of working
  • Free up cash: Channel funds to the initiatives and investments that will power growth

Client Results

  • Agnes Scott College

The most effective procurement practices can reduce an institution's purchasing cost base by an average of 8%–12% and deliver additional annual savings of 2%–3%. We work closely with your team to identify and realize savings across all spend categories and procurement levers, and we build your organizational capabilities so you can sustain those gains over the long term.


Client Results

  • Abilene Christian University
  • Agnes Scott College
  • LeTourneau University

Don’t settle for incremental improvements to your processes. We think boldly about your processes and focus on the areas of greatest opportunity to improve your competitive advantage. We provide a broad range of transformational capabilities, including Kaizen, Lean Six Sigma, Total Quality Management and more. And we deploy innovative process discovery and mining technologies to objectively assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your processes. Our collaborative approach isn't limited to the redesign of your processes--it also extends to the execution of all the key activities that will enable you to achieve your goals. We ensure that the right digital capabilities, such as automation, are enablers, not inhibitors, to the performance of your processes. And, most importantly, we bring leading change management capabilities to that your organization embraces the changes required to adopt and optimize your redesigned processes.

What to Expect

  • Better customer service: Get it right the first time, at speed, to improve student and faculty advocacy
  • Lower cost and impact: Reduce costs and waste, improve capacity
  • Improved service quality: Improve accuracy and reduce errors, decrease processing time
  • Happier students, faculty and staff: Reduce time spent on manual tasks and exception handling to focus on higher value activities

Client Results

  • Texas A & M University System
  • Prairie View A&M University
  • Tarleton State University
  • Angelo State University
  • Texas A&M International University
COMING SOON

We help you extract maximum value from all your data assets, no matter their location or format. Our analytics experts collaborate with you to tackle your most daunting challenges, so you not only get results quickly but build the internal skills to extend your new data prowess. We apply the latest analytics techniques and tools to help you generate insights that yield better, faster decisions. We can help you transform your data into a perpetual source of value.

What to Expect

  • Deeper insights: Quickly analyze results to identify the best combination of attributes and compare them across specific segments and other criteria
  • Immediate impact: Our approach ensures that successful results are rolled out quickly and achieve the desired outcomes
  • Scalability: Develop a roadmap for the long-term that produces consistent, impressive ROI

Client Results

Change isn’t just constant, it’s intensifying—in frequency and importance. The ability to continuously change, at speed and at scale, is now essential to high performance. We combine our deep expertise with state-of-the-art tools and training to provide you with everything you need to master change—not just once, but continuously.

  • Lead change: Facilitate leadership, effective decision- making and alignment with major initiatives
  • Maximize the value: Set the baseline, track your progress, and achieve the full value promised by your change initiative
  • Engage your people: Inspire the adoption of new behaviors and new standards of performance
  • Choreograph the process: Anticipate and mitigate risk, manage an integrated program and orchestrate employee led execution