The Big Switch: Taking Remote Work Anywhere

Although the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic shut down trav­el around the world, it didn’t shut down busi­ness—or clients in the midst of imple­ment­ing projects with the help of Porsche Con­sult­ing. That meant the man­age­ment consultancy’s pre­ferred col­lab­o­ra­tion style—hands-on and in per­son, with inten­sive work­shop ses­sions—had to be adjust­ed in the face of social dis­tanc­ing and trav­el bans.

From Cana­da to Chile, three projects show how con­sul­tants and their clients coped with the change and suc­ceed­ed in deliv­er­ing results despite a sud­den shift to remote work. Their expe­ri­ences show that dig­i­tal col­lab­o­ra­tion tools and cre­ativ­i­ty will reduce the need for on-site work in the future, but the per­son­al touch will never go out of style.

Codel­co, the world’s largest cop­per pro­duc­er, runs seven mines and eight pro­cess­ing plants in Chile. Until 2019, each one had its own logis­tics and pur­chas­ing operations.

In order to cre­ate syn­er­gies for the com­pa­ny as a whole, Codel­co decid­ed to move pur­chas­ing oper­a­tions to an off-site model and intro­duce remote work to the state-owned Chilean com­pa­ny. Codelco’s sup­ply chain cor­po­rate man­ag­er Ricar­do Reyes says it was hard to con­vince man­agers and staff that mov­ing part of their oper­a­tion off-site would work. “Min­ing is a very tra­di­tion­al indus­try where face-to-face rela­tions are a high pri­or­i­ty,” Reyes says. “There was a lot of pres­sure from plant man­agers to main­tain per­son­nel close by.”

Porsche Con­sult­ing was brought on to help cre­ate and imple­ment new process­es of remote col­lab­o­ra­tion. “When the Covid cri­sis hit, it helped change the mind­set of the peo­ple there,” says Porsche Con­sult­ing man­ag­er Fran­cis­co Fuenteal­ba. Remote work was sud­den­ly the safest option and proved to work out on a large scale—for the con­sul­tants as well. Instead of trav­el­ing back and forth to dis­tant mine loca­tions in Chile for face-to-face meet­ings, they imple­ment­ed reg­u­lar video meet­ings with scat­tered employees.

Almost overnight, dig­i­tal col­lab­o­ra­tion tools and Microsoft Teams meet­ings replaced small­er in-per­son meet­ings and con­fer­ences of up to eighty par­tic­i­pants. Sud­den­ly, Codel­co’s efforts—over a peri­od of more than three years—to effi­cient­ly imple­ment remote work along the sup­ply chain sec­tor were espe­cial­ly val­ued. In a first pilot area, the shift to a cen­tral­ized sys­tem reduced the approval time for pur­chase orders by 50 per­cent and opti­mized the team’s workload.

Porsche Con­sult­ing com­plet­ed its part of the project in June, but its influ­ence is still being felt beyond the key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors like improved turn­around time, reduced costs, and reduced staff needs. Every Thurs­day at 3 pm, Reyes and his team still meet online. “It’s a rit­u­al now,” he says with a laugh. “That’s one con­se­quence of the dis­ci­pline Porsche Con­sult­ing brought—peo­ple are con­tin­u­ing to make improve­ments even after the project is over.”

The Sto com­pa­ny, a major man­u­fac­tur­er of build­ing pre­fab pan­els, is all about mak­ing build­ing con­struc­tion more effi­cient. Sto Panel is a pro­gram to enable a net­work of con­trac­tors and fab­ri­ca­tors to cre­ate brand­ed pre­fab­ri­cat­ed high-qual­i­ty wall pan­els. In 2019, Porsche Con­sult­ing was com­mis­sioned to help Skyrise, a Sto Panel affil­i­ate in Pick­er­ing, Ontario, drive their own effi­cien­cy in their pro­duc­tion process. Skyrise’s thir­ty-per­son fac­to­ry had reached its lim­its and was look­ing for ways to turn out more pan­els with­in its exist­ing infrastructure.

After start­ing the project with an analy­sis of the fac­to­ry in late 2019, the Porsche Con­sult­ing team returned to Cana­da in early March 2020 to help imple­ment the iden­ti­fied solu­tions on the shop floor. But after just two weeks, trav­el restric­tions made it impos­si­ble to fin­ish the project in per­son. The team had to rapid­ly inte­grate new skills to keep the project on track. Online col­lab­o­ra­tion tools replaced Post-its and flip charts, and Porsche con­sul­tants brought remote work to the shop floor by facil­i­tat­ing team meet­ings at the Skyrise fac­to­ry with employ­ees via con­fer­enc­ing and mes­sag­ing apps. “Car­ry­ing out the imple­men­ta­tion togeth­er with our client is a cru­cial part of our work. So we tried to be there, with­out actu­al­ly being there,” says Porsche Con­sult­ing man­ag­er Jean Collard.

Patrick Kehrer, Sto’s man­u­fac­tur­ing and on-site solu­tions man­ag­er, was par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed by the team’s prob­lem-solv­ing cre­ativ­i­ty in the midst of a cri­sis. One unusu­al “hack” stood out: unable to eval­u­ate the newly imple­ment­ed process­es and ways of work­ing in per­son, Porsche con­sul­tants lever­aged video cam­eras on the fac­to­ry floor—and fast-for­ward­ed the footage to bet­ter under­stand pro­duc­tion flow and where it could still be opti­mized. “Eval­u­at­ing the videos that way was a major plus,” Kehrer says. “That real­ly saved us a lot of time.” The cre­ativ­i­ty paid off: pro­duc­tion more than doubled.

That doesn’t mean on-site vis­its are over, par­tic­u­lar­ly when part of the project is to win over employ­ees. “Phys­i­cal pres­ence leaves some­thing with work­ers that tele-pres­ence doesn’t,” Kehrer says. “But when you get to know peo­ple in per­son first, you can eas­i­ly tran­si­tion to dig­i­tal collaboration.”

The Brazil­ian cor­po­rate vouch­er com­pa­ny Tick­et Log works hard to keep its cus­tomers mov­ing. Over 30,000 clients rely on the com­pa­ny to man­age fuel­ing and main­te­nance for their cor­po­rate fleets—a total of around one mil­lion vehi­cles. That means track­ing 2.5 bil­lion liters of fuel and seven mil­lion spare parts each year.

Keep­ing track of all those vehi­cles is a huge job, one Tick­et Log—a sub­sidiary of the French multi­na­tion­al Edenred—want­ed to stream­line. Using AI and soft­ware robots to make deci­sions, Tick­et Log hoped to get bet­ter prices for its clients and bet­ter results from the 18,000 auto repair shops in its net­work. The ulti­mate goal was to reduce the num­ber of peo­ple involved in deci­sion-mak­ing, and enable clients to pin­point prob­lems in their car fleets.

Edenred brought in Porsche Con­sult­ing to help them review the automa­tion process from start to fin­ish. Meet­ings and work­shops fol­lowed a tra­di­tion­al for­mat, with con­sul­tants fly­ing in to Tick­et Log’s head­quar­ters in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, each week for all-day, in-per­son work­shops. In March, Covid shut­downs across Brazil made that impos­si­ble. The col­lab­o­ra­tion had to shift online—with suc­cess, says Eduar­do Fleck, head of fleet main­te­nance & mobil­i­ty solu­tions at Edenred Brazil. “We under­stood that it was pos­si­ble to work togeth­er in a very dynam­ic way even remote­ly and the gains were sig­nif­i­cant for the project.”

For that, the con­sul­tants had to rethink their approach. It was clear that the all-day ses­sions Edenred had come to expect from Porsche Consulting’s team didn’t trans­late well to an online for­mat: spend­ing three or four hours at a stretch in online meet­ings wasn’t viable. “When an online work­shop goes on more than two hours, peo­ple start dis­pers­ing,” says William Kang, Senior Expert at Porsche Con­sult­ing. There­fore, instead of hold­ing day-long ses­sions, the con­sul­tants broke down the steps into small­er chunks and pre­pared dif­fer­ent­ly, aim­ing to make meet­ings short­er. The Porsche Consulting’s team met sep­a­rate­ly each day for “pre-work” ses­sions, refin­ing their pro­pos­als and going over pos­si­ble dis­cus­sion points in advance. By map­ping out solu­tions, they were able to speed up dis­cus­sions with their Edenred part­ners later on. They quick­ly saw results, includ­ing sim­pli­fy­ing the order­ing sys­tem to make auto­mat­ic approvals more effi­cient. “It was impres­sive to see how we were able to incor­po­rate these improve­ments into the project in a remote con­text,” says Eduar­do Fleck. “We would not have con­sid­ered that pos­si­ble before the pandemic.”

The approach was bol­stered by a vir­tu­al project envi­ron­ment set up to show all the steps nec­es­sary to achieve Tick­et Log’s goals. By zoom­ing in to the step that was up for dis­cus­sion, par­tic­i­pants could eas­i­ly ori­ent them­selves and track what they had achieved so far and what lay ahead. “This helped us to focus,” Kang says, “because every­one knew that other ques­tions had not been for­got­ten but would be dis­cussed in an upcom­ing session.”