JPdeL and Associates

JPdeL and Associates 

• Strategies for manufacturing, service and international industries in the USA, Mexico and China.

• We assist firms in developing their strategic thinking and creating unique, industry game changing strategies.

• Guiding organizations to identify and develop their competitive advantage and core capabilities.

•  Our business is to get your business ahead, growing and increasing profitability.

• Our customers can be found in the USA, Mexico, and Asia.

• Creating Strategies

Creating a new strategy is risky and difficult. JPdeL and Associates has been assisting companies in identifying effective strategies for manufacturing, service and non-profit organizations for more than ten years.

A new and effective strategy requires fresh thinking, candid questioning and open minds. Identifying and implementing new competitive actions to create new products and services, or simply deciding to change a course of action demands strategic discipline.

Delivering results, providing higher levels of service, organizing people and aligning key business activities (processes) for effective implementation is perhaps as difficult as defining new strategies.

Me-too and copy the leader strategies, have shown, time after time, to be ineffective. Catching up is a losing game in this highly competitive environment.

Organizations must think about strategy differently to leapfrog their competition, to align or to create new abilities and strengths, to reposition and to deliver more effective results in the market by building a real competitive advantage in this changing competitive environment.

What We Do

• New Strategy Development

JPdeL and Associates works with its customers to identify strategies that can deliver better results. The process requires the participation of key people within the organization.

It demands an open mind to remove the underlying internal and external paradigms (roadblocks) that limit growth. The strategy development process is focused on liberating management from their past strategic formulas and operational shackles to create new avenues for growth or identify and remove the existing roadblocks to growth. Customers: Urbi Desarrollos, Cemex, Fevisa, Crain Enterprises, Gonher de Mexico, SCstorage.

•  Market and Competitive Studies

We assist customers with marketing and competitive studies. We identify key external and internal resources needed to deliver the new strategies and the information systems needed to track progress and integrate key strategic goals and their metrics. Customers: Urbi Desarrollos, Gonher de Mexico, Penn Aluminum, Masterpak.

• Leverage Your Most Effective Strategy

In some instances sticking to what you know best might be the most effective way to maintain and increase market leadership. JPdeL and Associates will assist your business in assessing whether your actual business designs and strategies should remain and how to leverage them for competitive advantage. In performing this evaluation we bring in ideas from other fields, analyze the existing cost structure, the cost experience gained, the profit pools in the industry chain, segmentation of markets, the application of strategic tools such as portfolio, marketing tools and more. Customers: Urbi, Gonher de mexico, Fevisa, Crain, Forestry Department at SIUC, Compac International, Grupo Detcel.

• Implementation of Strategy

We help organizations implement and follow up on strategies, define the actions, the scorecard system and make necessary adjustments to increase the likelihood of success.

• Strategic Experimentation

Leading and innovative companies such as Wal-Mart and Google in the USA, small jets producer Embraer and brewer AmBev in Brazil, Cemex in Mexico and many others have discovered "the formula". They all have in common their strategy experimentation process. It's based on small scale experimentation following a set of procedures to identify opportunities, learn what works, how it works and why it works. 

What's New?

Exciting new ideas about strategy creation are being implemented in a number of industries and leading companies. The works of scholars and practitioners are sheding light on new findings about strategy creation. Gary Hamel, Donald Sull, William Duggan, Steve Johnson, Steve Pinker, Clayton Christensen and the success of how Steve Jobs creates and markets exciting new generational products are making clearer that strategy is created through a process that brews ideas and new configurations of products and services from existing ones. New strategies do not happen overnight or in a weekend session. it does not work that way. Strategy brews over time and takes inputs from varied sourced, mainly outside our own business, outside our own industry.

Learning from China

China continues its incredible path of growth. When everyone thought that China was going to slow donw due to America's recession its turned inside to build and grow its internal markets.  China continues as an economic hub for growing business opportunities.  Althought the "China Price" threat is yet to dissapear is has lessened as Chinese companies are moving from copying to creating better and better products.

China can be seen as a threat or as an opportunity?  Which way is your business thinking?

We are constantly updating our knowledge about China, Latin America, India and technologies that might affect and change the rules of competition.

We visit China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan six to seven times a year to acquire first hand knowledge of how they compete, what strategies they implement, their cost structure and how all these are changing over time.

McKinsey and Company as well as other consulting companies and academics have recently published articles and books that together can give you a practical view about China.

The Financial Times  also has a very practical series of reports and articles about real experiences on doing business in China, how Chinese companies compete, how to conduct practical marketing and more.

A key consideration in developing your strategy is to include the actual and potential effect of China's manufacturing as a threat, as opportunity and as a potential partner in your activity chain.

Each case may be different and each Chinese negotiation a learning experience. Nontheless, time and frequent traveling and contact with Chinese companies teach you that business is good and can be rewarding if done properly and finding the right partner.

The strategy innovation activity is crucial for repositioning your company. How is strategy developed? A good book on this issue is:

Strategic Intuition by William Duggan. 2007.

There is no recipe nor a single book or article that will give you the right answer. Practice tells you that it requires putting together minds, ideas, practices, environmental scanning and the will to experiment with actions and strategies to find the right path to growth.