VALUE CREATION IN A PROCESS CONSULTANCY SETTING, CASE: ABOY

Abstract

The ever-changing prerequisites of the business world, the continuous discussions around value creation as well as the increasing curiosity toward the consultancy business were the starting points for this thesis. Besides the authors’ interest in consultation acted as a spark for the whole thesis project. The thesis itself investigates value creation in the process consultancy business and mainly tries to seek an answer for the following question: What are the key components when creating value in a consultant-client relationship? Furthermore, the study is to explain why these components are important, as well as try to provide an answer of how an individual consultant can affect these components with her actions. The research approach of this study is qualitative and the empirical framework is constructed around the main case, ABOY, (a consultancy company) and its clients, which are used as sub-cases in this thesis. The very core of the report is based on the empirical data, especially on a matrix, which summarises all the empirical findings. In the matrix the authors have collected the most common issues that came up during the interviews, which were conducted in different organisations. The theoretical framework was based on a few main concepts that the authors perceived to be applicable for the consultancy business. The main concepts used in this thesis are Value Constellation by Normann and Ramirez (1994, 1998) and the ideas of co-creation adopted from Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004). Both of these concepts propose that value is created in the interaction and that it is co-produced or co-created with the customer. With the help of the empirical material the authors were able to identify the key components, which were later analysed with the Frame of Reference that was built to create an understanding of the investigated problem and topic. After the analysis the authors reached the conclusion that value creation in the process consultancy business lies in the relationship between the consultant and the client. This conclusion challenges the prevailing concepts, as the authors discovered that the interaction could only be part of value creation since the nature of value creation is far more complex than one may imagine.