Customer-Centric Operational Excellence
Developing a culture of execution and customer-centric operations in a culturally diverse organization.
How Taligens helped a European hydropower generation company stop hemorrhaging margin across its project portfolio and build a culture of committed, customer-centric execution across a globally distributed organization.
Inorganic growth creates a paradox. The acquisitions that expand a company's footprint also multiply its silos — cultural, functional, and geographic. When the goal is to double the business in five years, the gap between the global ambition and the fragmented reality of day-to-day execution can erode the very margin that growth is supposed to generate.
Taligens was engaged to address that gap directly — redesigning the company's core operational processes, building cross-geography alignment, and putting in place the management practices a global leadership team needs to run a project portfolio with clarity and accountability.
The Starting Point
Having gone through a period of rapid inorganic growth, the client — a European hydropower generation company — sought to capture global market share and secure the benefits of having merged smaller companies and business units into one global player, with a goal of doubling the business within a five-year cycle.
The company required major reorganization. The CEO understood that meeting their growth targets demanded radical changes in working methods and a sharper focus on collaboration across geographies, cultural differences, and functional silos that had hardened over years of independent operation.
Initial diagnosis revealed a deeper problem: the company was hemorrhaging cash at multiple points throughout the entire process to build new hydropower generation plants — eroding initial project margins from a range of 35% down to -10% across different projects. The growth ambition was real. The organizational infrastructure to execute it profitably was not yet in place.
The Approach
Taligens worked hand-in-hand with lead engineering design teams at the company's main locations in Germany, Brazil, and the US. The first task was to create esprit de corps and alignment toward the new strategy — giving globally distributed teams a shared sense of direction and a common operating language before redesigning the processes they would use to execute it.
Commitment-based principles were applied to the redesign of all core operational processes, from Opportunity to Order to Order to Cash, as well as to the company's project management practices. The team ensured rigorous execution of all aspects of engineering design work — both pre- and post-bid — in a coordinated effort to secure profitable design and flawless delivery of each project. Key management practices were designed and implemented for the global leadership team to monitor progress across every project in the portfolio, bringing visibility to key issues and decision-making points before they became costly delays.
We went from projects eroding our margins to a team with the practices, alignment, and visibility to build profitably at scale.
How We Did It
The engagement ran in four coordinated tracks, sequenced to build the cultural foundation before redesigning the processes that would run on top of it.
- Cross-Geography Team Alignment
Built esprit de corps and strategic alignment across engineering teams in Germany, Brazil, and the US — establishing a shared operating language and common commitment to the growth strategy.
- Opportunity-to-Order Process Redesign
Applied commitment-based principles to the full pre-bid and post-bid engineering design process, ensuring that every project entered execution with profitable margins locked in.
- Order-to-Cash Process Redesign
Redesigned the delivery-through-payment process with the same commitment-based rigor, eliminating the cash leakage points that had been eroding margins across the project portfolio.
- Global Project Governance
Designed and implemented management practices that gave the global leadership team real-time visibility into project progress, key issues, and decision-making points across every location.
The Results
The engagement gave the company's global leadership team the organizational infrastructure — the aligned teams, redesigned processes, and governance practices — to pursue its growth ambition without sacrificing margin. Specifically:
One operating model across three continents
Engineering teams in Germany, Brazil, and the US aligned around a shared strategy, common processes, and a culture of committed execution.
End-to-end operational redesign
Core processes from Opportunity to Order through Order to Cash rebuilt with commitment-based principles — closing the gaps where cash had been leaking.
Rigorous pre- and post-bid discipline
Engineering design practices standardized across all projects, ensuring profitable terms were locked in before execution began and maintained throughout delivery.
Global project governance for leadership
A set of management practices that gave the global leadership team clear sight lines into project status, emerging issues, and critical decisions — wherever in the world the work was happening.
Is this kind of engagement right for your organization?
This work is designed for organizations that recognize the following signals:
- You are scaling through acquisitions and need to integrate disparate operations into a coherent whole.
- Cash is leaking across your project or production process — but no single team has full visibility into where.
- Cultural and functional silos are preventing the cross-geography collaboration your growth strategy requires.
- Your leadership team lacks the management practices to monitor complex global projects in near-real time.
- You need operational redesign alongside cultural change — not one or the other.
Ready to build operations that scale profitably?
Let's talk about where your process is leaking value and what it will take to fix it.