Prological collaborates with Deloitte Access Economics on supply chain projects
Deloitte Access Economics is working with specialist consultancy firm Prological on complex projects that require deep insights into supply chain, logistics, and warehousing.
As the name suggests, Deloitte Access Economics is the firm’s local economics advisory wing focused on economic modelling, financial forecasting, and policy evaluation, formed upon Deloitte’s purchase of Access Economics in 2011.
Meanwhile, Prological Consulting was established one year earlier by founder and chief executive Peter Jones, and serves clients across Australia and New Zealand on a range of supply chain matters, from network design and sourcing through to warehouse design.
Now, the pair are collaborating to address the growing complexities in supply chain management, bridging the gap between logistics and economic analysis to support both their clients and rising expectations as to issues such as distribution centre design, greater efficiencies from existing facilities, and optimisting route and load planning in response to carbon reduction pressures.
“Large-scale organisations often possess deep expertise in specific domains but may lack the industry-specific knowledge to tie together the complex data analysis into practical, real-world applications. At the same time, supply chain consulting firms don’t have a battery of economic and demographic experts with the consummate access to available metadata,” said Prological in statement.
In response to this disparate set of required skills, Prological and Deloitte Access Economics have been tapping each other to fill their respective gaps, which the firms say are intrinsically linked, with their mutual work on The Iconic forwarded as one example. The online fashion and sporting brand originally engaged Prological, before the advisory realised it needed some hard data backing.
“Initially engaged to discuss future fulfilment strategy and expansion, it became evident thata demographic study was going to support the decisions to be made by The Iconic’s leadership team,” the consultancy stated. “In short, we needed to know where the ‘arch-typical’ Iconic customer lives and works now, and where they will live and work in ten years’ time.”
Enter Deloitte, which provided the basis of Prological’s recommendations in designing future supply chain set-ups and a strategic future road-map, “based on evidence”. Meanwhile, Deloitte Access Economics has praised Prological for providing “real-world insights”, dubbed “truth-grounding” in Deloitte world, in turning ideas and hypotheses into accurate, detailed models.
“Prological have been really great in helping us make sure that everything we do in ourmodelling reflects day-to-day reality and market sentiments,” said partner Eamon McGinn. “When you do high level analysis, the modelling can be complicated from an economic point of view. We need to determine whether the numbers are realistic and reflective of what is really happening.”
