Strategy

Marston Holdings Ltd (MHL), a private equity-backed enterprise with a turnover exceeding £350 million. Primarily operating within the UK, the company caters to diverse sectors, prioritising services related to legal and regulatory obligations enforcement, including but not limited to parking enforcement, fine collection, and management.

MHL embarked on a transformative journey to achieve remarkable growth, with a focus on unlocking substantial savings through a strategic procurement programme. In collaboration with Curzon Consulting, MHL aimed to address challenges such as insufficient spend visibility, dominant incumbent suppliers, and limited procurement influence within the organisation.

Under the leadership of Curzon Consulting and CEO Martin Johnson, the project, named Project Eagle, aimed to drive sales, optimise costs, and enhance productivity. The procurement transformation programme set out to revamp MHL’s procurement organisation while delivering substantial savings.

Curzon’s approach was multi-faceted, leveraging deep data analytics, innovative thinking, and tried-and-tested change management methodologies. The process involved three main workstreams: Spend Opportunity Assessment, Benefits Delivery, and Procurement Organisation Assessment.

The Spend Opportunity Assessment phase involved a rapid analysis of MHL’s spend, identifying significant savings. Despite initial challenges, the team delivered the core assessment in less than five business days. Subsequent phases focused on implementing cost-saving initiatives, including achieving quick wins within the first two months.

The Benefits Delivery phase saw the implementation of various procurement strategies across different expenditure categories, such as strategic sourcing, product harmonisation, and make vs. buy analysis. These initiatives led to significant cost reductions.

Additionally, the Procurement Organisation Assessment aimed to enhance MHL’s procurement capabilities. Recommendations included restructuring the team, enhancing governance, and improving strategy and systems.

Throughout the project, Curzon fostered a collaborative relationship with MHL, employing a unified ‘one team’ approach and acting as trusted advisors. A well-defined governance model ensured efficient communication and problem-solving.

Despite challenges such as supplier resistance and stakeholder reluctance to change, Curzon overcame obstacles through pragmatic approaches, evidence-based reasoning, and stakeholder management expertise. The project delivered measurable results, exceeding savings targets by 28%, with a sizeable in-year cash impact. Qualitative outcomes included improved transparency in spend areas, satisfaction with new products, and enhanced trust in the procurement team.

In conclusion, the partnership between MHL and Curzon Consulting exemplified resilience, innovation, and successful collaboration, resulting in significant cost savings and organisational improvements.

Chetan, Stephane and the Curzon team were contracted to deliver an optimisation programme at Marston Holdings. The Curzon team approached the complex task with energy and professionalism, which was key to the ultimate success of the programme.

The technical knowledge and capability of the Curzon team were clear from the start of the engagement and we had total faith in their capability to deliver the ambitious goals they had been set. Marston would recommend Curzon to anyone who requires the domain knowledge and experience of a capable consulting partner. We look forward to working with them in the future

Martin Johnson, CEO, Marston Holdings Ltd

Responding to the UK Government’s productivity challenge, National Highways (NH), in partnership with Curzon Consulting, is delivering a transformational 30% improvement in productivity and can realise a multimillion pounds in savings by 2030.

Over the past twenty years, the construction sector has struggled to demonstrate meaningful productivity improvements. NH set a challenging target of a 30% productivity improvement and a 5-10% cost reduction over Road Investment Strategy 2 (2020-25) and appointed Curzon as its strategic delivery partner.

Significant progress has been made over the last year (23/24). There has been an average of 30% productivity improvement across monitored assets, and the percentage of hours lost has been significantly reduced. This achievement demonstrates the robustness of the standardised systems and processes that have been developed and deployed.

Core enablement of the productivity improvement lies in the timely capture and reporting of performance via an innovative and interactive App, rolled out initially across the Tier 2/sub-contractor supply chain. This has enabled NH to make faster, informed decisions where there are significant variances to plan, enforcing greater accountability on the supply chain, identifying and specifying standards and best practices, and raising supply chain awareness of what good performance looks like. In turn, this has fostered greater collaboration between NH and its supply chain without requiring contractual amendments. Increased scheme predictability is tangible, with Tier 1s rebase-lining their schemes to include productivity improvements while modular design improvements and standardisation contribute additional value.

Creating and implementing a digital productivity app and dashboard has provided NH with a consistent stream of standardised productivity data and relevant context directly from the point of delivery. This has brought about a positive change in how NH and the supply chain collaborate. For the first time, NH PMs are engaging in conversations based on intelligence gathered from the dashboard. With weekly progress reports, NH can now access productivity data insights to scrutinise and challenge the supply chain, which was impossible before.

NH is using digital intelligence to collaborate with its supply chain, measure the productivity of key assets, and set improved productivity targets. They now have an efficient system for gathering, reviewing, and acting on productivity data. NH has developed a methodology to calculate productivity value and demonstrate efficiencies to the Office of Rail and Road. NH can now utilise the extensive productivity data for strategic procurement, commercial decision-making, and contracting.

The 30% target improvement is being achieved or exceeded on most asset classes, giving NH confidence that improved productivity in Road Investment Strategy 3 (2025-30) will translate into multi-million-pound benefits.

The Curzon team is making significant contributions. National Highways has been striving to set asset-level productivity baselines for over 10 years. The work we are progressing together is transforming how National Highways reviews project performance and is also beginning to inform wider industry Infrastructure Client Group.

David Bray, Programme Director, National Highways

After a period of impressive top-line growth, AIG Life’s leadership now concentrated on driving for profitability on a US GAAP basis.  Working with Curzon to isolate what could best deliver profit uplift, we zoomed in on a stubbornly un-moving customer persistency rate and recognised that every 1% point of lapse averted would yield significant and multiplicative profit gains.  

Curzon was engaged on an ambitious programme to rapidly get control of lapse and release commercial benefit, and to build the capability to achieve best practice retention management.  This was an enormous challenge given the starting point: no set persistency strategy, an absence of key lapse analytics, retention not owned or resourced in the organisation, and a lack of lapse prevention and turnaround processes.   

Over 11 months through 2019, we took a pragmatic, agile, and ‘together’ approach to accelerate to retention excellence, securing the organisation’s buy-in to what it would take to get there, and quickly demonstrating the commercial, operational and customer benefits of joined-up retention management.  Curzon enabled the new cross-functional working essential for success, and gave the business the structures and confidence to operate highly effective preventative and save processes – internally and leveraging external partners.  

Among the prime watershed moments were revealing how:

• a shift in distribution mix from advised face-to-face to telesales had created a hitherto unseen problem of drop-out inside first 3 months
• customer communications from welcome onwards needed to explain clearly the personal value of life insurance, and how holding it ensures financial provision for those you love
• rather than automatically cancelling customers on request, customer service had a responsibility to engage them before they make a potentially uninformed decision 

When the business took the reins 3 months after improvements were implemented, lapse rate had been reduced to the best practice % mark on a run-rate basis and incremental revenue and profit benefit unlock was exceeding our original target.  This translated annualised into 5-figure policy saves and a cumulative £multi-million gain in Pre-Tax Operating Income by 2023.  The business had taken ownership of a new retention management function, with a new Lapse MI suite providing the predictive insights to continually optimise retention.  Beyond achieving the agreed objectives, the work also led to complementary projects including work to minimise drop-out in the Bank partnership sales channel. 

Commenting on the success, AIG Life CFO Donald MacLean said: 

“Curzon helped us obtain the confidence and operational ‘can-do’ to get control of lapse sooner than we could have expected, and then to push on to best practice performance. 

As always, their skill was in balancing pace of change and the results imperative with the need to take the organisation with them on the journey.  A key achievement was building the necessary collaboration between the many functions that needed to act together to manage retention in a joined-up way.  

The result was a tangible and ongoing commercial win, and a vital new balance struck between sales and retention for business profitability and sustainability”

Project Performance Accelerator (PPA) was designed to develop and implement a delivery mechanism for Highways England’s (HE) overarching Business Transformation Programme, addressing inconsistent levels of capability throughout HE’s Project Management community and developing highly skilled project delivery teams. Overall, HE’s three main Major Project programmes account for 80 projects worth more than £23bn, each being delivered by a supply chain or contractor led by a Project Management team.

PPA’s leader Steph Illingworth engaged Curzon to interpret and structure her Vision of the PPA Programme into clear deliverables, shaping the fundamentals. There was consensus on cultural flaws and ineffective ways of working. Revealing a deeply siloed organisation with multiple departments or technical areas that lacked collaboration or a holistic view of the primary objectives and deliverables: projects were not executed on time and within budget, nor maximising benefits and social value. Also, capability development and training programmes were too theoretical and onerous, focusing on processes and systems rather than people, impacting the overall project success.

Focusing on performance management, capability development, project control capability and enhancing commercial acumen, the PPA Programme included two outputs as the medium for change: An Immersive Learning Experience and Digital Project Management Guidebook.

The Immersive Learning experience was designed to disrupt the way programmes are delivered. The Digital Project Management Guidebook contained PM content selected through independent reviews and capability assessments. Both outputs were crafted around the project lifecycle of typical HE infrastructure projects, set to be delivered in-person over a period of 18 months. Cohorts were selected to receive a tailored experience, improve project team maturity, and provide a solid foundation for capability uplift to achieve clear learning outcomes and benefits.

At the heart of the PPA philosophy was to enable project teams to grow, enhancing ‘ways of working’ whilst bolstering project performance. These included a “working better together model”; a fundamental shift in the way individuals interact and take ownership of overlapping project aspects and problem-solving techniques. This, along with the Immersive Learning, reinforced the Programme’s success, shifting the focus from systems and processes to people.

The pandemic introduced significant challenges, necessitating the immediate conversion of the Programme from in-person workshops to a virtual setting. The team adapted structures and materials, incorporating a variety of software suites to enhance the learner experience. Frequent interaction and close collaboration with the internal and senior stakeholders were critical to maintaining speed and delivery, adopting a fail-fast, fix fast approach to syllabus creation

The consulting team could interpret the client’s vision into a clear pathway, support and enhance the design to become one of the most successful transformation project delivered in HE.

The Digital Project Management Guidebook launched in August 2020 via four interactive webinars to c.300 employees have now received over 1,000 unique viewers. A modified deployment strategy was adopted in light of the pandemic, redesigned as a remote Immersive Learning Experience. However, over 5,049 hours of remote learning have been received by 100 staff through 9 project teams, enhancing teams’ capability with a combined portfolio value greater than £3.3bn.