Kearney is known for its distinctive, collegial culture and down-to-earth, approachable consultants with a passion for doing innovative client work. We focus our resources, leverage our purpose-built organization, and drive excellence in all we do to ensure we are collaborative, authentic, and forward-thinking.

Our approach is project-oriented and deliverables-based—with a clear endpoint. Up front, we spend time defining the unique approach that best meets our clients’ requirements, crafting an efficient work plan and selecting an optimal team to execute the work. Unless a clearly defined additional need for our expertise exists, we maintain the relationship at a senior level but step back from active engagement. Our clients highly value this objective “engage, deliver, and move on” model.

Kearney brings proven capabilities to develop and execute tailored strategies to achieve immediate impact and sustained, superior performance for programs and organizations. Core strategy, operations, organization, and IT strengths are supported by bottom-up and rigorous advanced analytics that provide fact-based, revelatory insights to support unquestionable findings, conclusions, and recommendations. We are frequently involved in helping clients implement our recommendations.

These capabilities include:

Improving program affordability

Defense budgets will continue to be strained in the face of multiple severe national security threats. Consequently, the push for improved affordability in programs and services remains intense and relentless. We have a long track record of teaming with clients to drive affordability in complex programs and services, regardless of their life-cycle stage. Our keys to affordability include achieving cost transparency, addressing root causes of waste, and improving productivity while ensuring mission readiness and operational availability. Capabilities encompass strategy, product and weapon systems development (including both hardware and software), supplier management, production, cycle time reduction, sustainment, and negotiation support.

Transforming operational performance

Our breadth of A&D supply chain experience enables clients to maximize productivity, achieve timeliness and reliability, and manage risk in delivering on mission requirements. Our teams bring competencies in weapon systems development, complexity reduction, supply chain configuration, manufacturing efficiency and effectiveness, acquisition and supply management, IT management and operations, and maintenance, sustainment, and logistics, including structuring contract incentives such as performance-based logistics. Our objectivity, analytical rigor, and industry experience provide critical credibility in working with suppliers to achieve the cost and performance transparency that enables high-impact yet realistic and sustainable solutions to the toughest operational challenges.

Driving innovation

Accessing and accelerating the adoption or adaptation of innovative technologies is key to maintaining the advantage against adversaries in today’s environment. Kearney’s Best Innovator competition has since 2003 provided a deep understanding of how successful innovators continuously improve and execute their innovations strategies. This first-hand research, our direct involvement in working with high-tech companies in the commercial sector, and our understanding of the challenges of the defense acquisition process place us in a unique position to help bridge the gap between commercial sector technology innovation and defense sector applications. Our teams deliver innovation that works by bringing a diversity of technically savvy, multi-discipline, cross-industry experience. We also employ proven product development approaches that introduce creative, non-traditional thinking, while also integrating strategy, operations, organization, and IT enablement.

Transforming organizations to meet evolving missions

The changing nature of national security threats, relentless budget pressures, the need to accelerate the introduction of new technologies, and the challenge to attract and retain new talent are putting pressure on defense organizations to embrace change. Present organizational structures and processes are often ill-equipped to meet today’s challenges. Our organization transformation teams have both commercial and government experience and employ their organizational effectiveness expertise through a highly collaborative working style to help our clients create sustainable high-performing organizations to better enable key missions. Tactics are designed for each specific situation, but frequently include streamlining accountability, improving performance management and metrics, accelerating speed to decisions, improving talent management processes, and reducing excessive overheads. Our talent management approach comprehends the special government talent life-cycle challenges while bringing fresh perspectives to enable change and improve organizational performance.

Conducting business case, should-cost, and alternative analyses

Understanding the cost trade-offs and implications of competing alternatives is critical in making big-ticket decisions. Similarly, understanding the engineering-based, bottom-up “should cost” of weapon systems can serve as a powerful tool in managing affordability in acquisitions. We have a strong track record of objectivity and unparalleled analytical rigor in conducting studies that have withstood intense scrutiny across a wide range of stakeholders. Frequently, we can incorporate our commercial sector tools, analytical approaches, and best-practice frameworks to enable valuable evaluations that go beyond the traditional parametric costing approaches that rely on extrapolation from legacy systems.