The South African operation of WorleyParsons’ global consulting business, Advisian, has experienced notable growth since its launch less than a year ago with its initial office of five members expanding to close to 100 in an effort to service the needs of clients and deliver expert strategic and management consulting services coupled with strong engineering and technical expertise to the sub-Saharan Africa market.

Adam Boughton, Advisian’s Regional Executive Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, says that in the 10 months that the Advisian office has been operating in South Africa, the team has managed to bring together multisector capabilities to create greater value for its clients.

“We have placed a great deal of effort in engaging with clients, understanding their unique challenges and looking at how we can apply our specialist capabilities in solving these challenges. We help our clients approach their challenges from a different perspective and explore alternate solutions to their problems.

“Our existing clients know us as problem solvers but don’t necessarily know the commercial and technical depth that our experience extends to and how we can help them with our specialised advisory services. For example, we’re having conversations with our mining clients about their power challenges and bring our Power Advisory Practise into the discussion to look at the options available,” explains Boughton.

Advisian’s consulting services are focused on asset intensive businesses operating within the hydrocarbons, minerals and metals, chemicals, power and infrastructure sectors. Boughton believes that this cross-sector diversity has been an important element in the rapid growth of the company. “While minerals and mining is a key segment of our business, our Ports and Marine Terminals Practice is going extremely well, particularly with our clients working on delivery projects in Africa, while our Environmental and Society team is growing significantly as a strong standalone offering. Power is also a growth area for us right now,” says Boughton.

Globally, Advisian has around 3 000 consultants in 19 countries, delivering management and technical consulting services across the full asset lifecycle. The company focuses on harnessing the significant experience of their locally based teams while leveraging the strong global capabilities to provide their clients with access to world best capability across a wide range of industries and asset portfolios.

Advisian currently has two key offices in South Africa, in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively, with a satellite location in Durban, that jointly service the entire continent of Africa. “The core basis of Advisian is to provide the right specialist capability to our clients, regardless of where they are located. As part of the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region, we can draw on the resources and capabilities within the region and greater Global group to deliver practical and innovative solutions,” comments Boughton.

While WorleyParsons typically works in EPCM and PMC delivery of a project, Advisian operates in the inception and concept phase, providing advice on how to get a project started, understanding the challenges and coming up with customised solutions for successful, viable projects. “Our primary concern is to provide ease for our clients, to determine what they need in order to get their product delivered as effectively and efficiently as possible, so that the next phase becomes easier by carrying through the knowledge that Advisian has already garnered,” Boughton explains.

To this end Advisian employs StepWise, a methodology developed by Advisian RSA to specifically assist clients in a capital constrained environment. “StepWise is a structured option analysis approach undertaken before pre-feasibility stage that allows us to understand our clients’ challenges and come up with the best, most effective solutions that work. It’s a low-cost way of determining if the next step in investment is feasible or not,” says Boughton.

In the brownfield operations space, Advisian provides unparalleled operational improvement solutions through its combination of deep technical domain knowledge in the performance capability of assets and methods on achieving the optimal outputs. Rather than just concentrating on cost saving initiatives that other management consulting firms can only consider, Advisian goes far deeper than this and provides true and sustainable performance improvement outcomes to its clients. As a value-added offering, Advisian engages with prospective clients by conducting an early assessment of the organisation’s operations, processes to identify areas of improvement.

Boughton is confident that Advisian’s proven business model will work exceptionally well with its clients in Africa as the office has a substantial amount of knowledge to impart that has already been gained on other projects around the world, combined with a good local track record and strong client relations.