Akeance Consulting, an independent consulting firm

BFM BUSINESS PARTNER - This Tuesday, July 14, in the program “Objectif Croissance” presented by Jeanne Baron, Michel Mondet, president of Akeance, reviewed the missions and projects of Akeance Consulting, an independent consulting firm specializing in operational strategy. 

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Jeanne Baron: Michel Mondet, hello, welcome to the Objectif Croissance set, I am delighted to see you again today. You are the president, founder of Akeance, the company we are going to talk about. You are a consulting firm, it is your core business. Can you tell us about what you do?

Michel Mondet: We carry out so-called operational strategy missions. So concretely, that means either studies or project management, which are obviously intended to have an impact and a strong added value on the company. The impacts are either on the P&L itself, or on the operating mode and the organization of the company, in general.

Jeanne Baron: So concretely, what does this mean in terms of the missions that you are going to be able to carry out?

Michel Mondet: Concretely, it depends a little on the sectors, but a few examples, in the manufacturing industry what we often do is cost price calculations and recalculations, which is a very complicated subject. It is in the real estate sectors, the choice of management tools, whether for real estate or property management to manage all clients and contracts. In banking, it will be very different, because we will be interested in projects that revolve more around the identification and management of alerts in the fight against money laundering or in the fight against financing terrorism. This is more or less the type of missions that we carry out. In services, we also have, in a very general way, subjects of reorganization of governance, of process flattening, above all operational efficiency and operational safety.

Jeanne Baron: So these missions are very concrete, they are also very varied and they require a lot of know-how. And that is quite essential in your profession. In addition, there are large companies today that trust you. How do you explain the success of your business which today is not experiencing the crisis? It is a great success.

Michel Mondet: It's true, we are even growing in the midst of a crisis. There are two reasons, there has to be a meeting. There are reasons that matter to us and reasons that matter to customers. Ourselves, it is because each time we have a double skill which is the job itself, to carry out studies to manage projects: it is a job, it is not just common sense! And in addition, we add, we couple it with a skill that corresponds to the expertise of the customer, which makes it possible to be much more comfortable, to better understand the customer's concern.

And then on the client side, whether in companies, large companies, or mid-sized companies, there are more and more needs, increasingly strong coordination between teams, between departments and services. And de facto on projects, we are always a bit of a broker of skills or a broker of consensus.

Jeanne Baron: How do you imagine the future? What big project are you working on today? How has this health crisis affected you or not? You said it, you are not affected, you are growing. What's the next step for you?

Michel Mondet: I am wary of goals, so I'm not sure if I answer with a goal. It is often a whim. But we can clearly see some difficulties over the last few months. We have seen very simple emerging points in companies, we can see very clearly, for example, that cash flow forecasts in services or in industry, cash flow forecasts often deserve to be reviewed, because they are very sensitive subjects but beyond the amounts and money management, there is the process of forecasting inflows and outflows.

Jeanne Baron: And then the imponderables in the life of a company?

Michel Mondet: Completely, you have to know a little more or you are in your forecast. Many businesses, oddly enough, do not have a true cash flow forecasting process. It is another subject, the flattening of processes, it is the dematerialization of supplier invoices. These subjects, they have become very very major on the occasion of these two, three months of "confinement" or period of crisis. In investment funds, it's a bit the same thing, the challenge of business plans, it's more from the same angle that we will look at it. It will not only be a coherence of numbers, it is also a reality of does it pass or not.

Jeanne Baron: But beyond an objective because I understood objectives are scary and you are right.

Michel Mondet: The objective is capricious.

Jeanne Baron: Yes you are right, it is capricious but the future is rather flourishing for you, there are no major concerns?

Michel Mondet: Absolutely, because the business world is more and more horizontal and deserves more and more to be coordinated. We can clearly see that the arrival of teleworking a little overwhelmingly in large groups will deserve even more management and coordination, particularly on projects, of course we are, we are exactly in this pattern to offer added value on rigorous "square management" "projects with client expertise and consulting expertise.

Jeanne Baron: Well thank you very much, Michel Mondet, for being our guest today to have enlightened us on your professional framework. And I remind that you are the president and founder of Akeance, the company we just talked about today.