Pressure has never been greater on retail landlords. In the 12 months prior to the Covid-19 crisis, almost 100 retailers with 16,000 stores went into administration. Remaining businesses were achieving rent reductions of up to 30%, with shorter lease lengths and longer rent-free periods. Covid-19 only increased the pressure on the sector, and our client saw a 50% fall in its share price. The new CEO needed to announce a new strategy quickly built on solid insights.

mean absolute accuracy across 300 forecasts

I was delighted at how quickly Arca Blanca worked with our Strategy Team to deliver a powerful bespoke decision-support tool that is unlike anything else in the industry. This has given us proprietary, data-led insights that have become a core part of our transformative strategy to reimagine the future of retail.

Arca Blanca developed a tool that predicts sustainable rent levels for retail tenants across 300 different sub-sectors and geographies. The tool, which uses over 200 data sources in its predictions, allows users to quickly understand the effect of different economic scenarios on the industry. These predictions have been proven to have a mean absolute percentage error of <10%. The tool was used to set a bold new strategy which will evolve as the tool senses market changes.

Landsec: Predicting the future of retail rents

Tharsus, a leading UK robotics company, identified a need for a secure, social distancing device following the outbreak of Covid-19. The device would enable businesses to reopen at a higher capacity. Without a background in consumer products, the client needed help to create an operating model, sales channels and value proposition messaging. Because of the evolving nature of the pandemic, the company had an extremely limited timeframe in which to execute testing and production to meet high, but concentrated demand.

Working with Arca Blanca to take Bump to market was an extremely positive experience and we would be delighted to partner with them in the future.
Their expertise and how they collaborated in the joint team meant Tharsus could pivot from delivering complex robotic solutions to taking a consumer device to market in just a few months, addressing the crisis of a global pandemic at warp speed.
The joint-team approach challenged our thinking and delivered the experience and capability to create a launchpad for more products in the future.

Arca Blanca enabled Tharsus to deliver the first product just three months after the idea was incepted. A new organisation was created, along with an operating model to support the sale of a product to a new market segment in just weeks. A go-to-market plan was devised, involving a rapid partner evaluation process. As a result, Tharsus received widespread praise for its product, along with new customers for the wider business. The success of the operating model also created a launch pad for developing new products in a new market.

From concept to market in only 3 months

Ocado is now the largest technology company in the UK. The business has sold its sophisticated delivery platform – known as the Ocado Smart Platform – to leading grocers across the world, marking their shift from UK online grocer, to global technology solutions provider. They needed an operating model that would support rapid growth while still retaining their innovative and unique culture. This had to deliver best-in-class solutions to their new grocery clients across the world.

I can truly say, I have never worked with consultants like Arca Blanca before. They are so passionate about doing the right thing for the client and immediately operated as part of the Ocado team, going above and beyond anything in the contract to ensure success of both the transformation.

Ocado is constantly innovating. Arca Blanca matched this with an iterative design process, which was tailored to enhance collaborative thinking. We brought together a passionate team of clients and consultants, each bringing different expertise to build upon new ideas and opportunities. The operating model we co-designed is flexible and able to evolve fast to capture market opportunities, and deliver results sustainably. The business has an embedded capability that can review, rethink, and reinvent the business as it grows.

Ocado: Enabling 10x growth through global expansion

This major pharmaceuticals wholesaler sought competitive, commercial and purpose driven impacts from data. With huge historic data assets and a market with many readily available sources the challenge was to demonstrate the path to value in affordable steps – reshaping organisational strategy towards becoming data-led. With established data vendors active in the market, the critical questions were where to position and how to exploit the organisations own, unique assets.

Arca Blanca delivered a rapid data proof of concept project into the UK medical drug market. This showed how to deliver an automated, optimised set of drug lifetime management tools, and how to generate a paid-for “insight as a service” revenue stream. It also laid bare the dramatic variations in access to healthcare across the UK.

Arca Blanca developed an online tool providing insights for pharmaceutical drug manufacturers, and their account managers. This highlights the commercial opportunities from better managing the flow of critical products, and started the process of moving the whole company towards a more ‘data led’ approach. Joint team follow-on projects have started to embed forecasting and data insights into business-as-usual. 

Prototyping a paid-for customer insight service in eight weeks

A major UK property developer was becoming increasingly impacted by the effects of property chains. A quarter of customers in chains were cancelling purchases, and remaining transactions were taking months to complete. The business had begun providing part exchange facilities through a mixture of self-funding and multiple third-party providers, but this resulted in multiple customer visits, high transaction costs, and complex ways of working.

customer transactions through the enhanced facility

Arca Blanca have played a critical role… Their approach and people hugely accelerated the time it would have taken us to get this working, to get momentum, and to roll it out..

Arca Blanca worked with the client to design a part exchange operation that was more efficient, better governed, and had a superior customer experience. The client used this blueprint to secure greater funding capacity from their lenders, and allowed them to complete 150% more transactions in-house compared with the previous year. For hundreds of customers, this meant they could move home quicker, safe in the knowledge that they were no longer tied to a chain.

Supporting £160m of customer transactions

The UK’s leading developer of retirement homes was being heavily impacted by a property market slowdown. Prospective customers were struggling to sell their own homes, further compounding the already narrow access to suitable retirement communities in the UK. The new CEO wanted to offer customers new choice by launching new tenure options. He needed to show signs of a turnaround to investors within a few months.

The project has been a real success. The joint team combined our own in-house capability with experienced change practitioners from Arca Blanca – ensuring that the project was anchored in McCarthy & Stone, but benefited from new insights and an innovative approach.

Speed was key. Arca Blanca would bring start-up thinking to a 40-year-old property company to co-create multi-tenure retirement housing options, test at a number of incubator sites and roll out further. For the client, this meant learning to become a landlord fast. For their customers, however, it would offer greater access to retirement properties for those struggling to sell their homes, enabling them to still move into suitable accommodation through renting.

McCarthy Stone: Realising a £200m opportunity

A large London-based further education charity with students speaking over a hundred languages wanted to bring coding to a diverse candidate pool. This would create a route to well-paid careers in a UK sector with a skills shortage. They identified a new business opportunity: using a teacher-less learning platform to produce highly employable full-stack developers. Help was needed to decide on whether to invest and if so, on what terms.

from an educational platform joint venture

Arca Blanca was called to support a large London based future education provider ahead of their venture into education technology.  Our expertise in business model design and in-depth analysis of risk that would emerge from new this new business model allowed the executive team and trustees to be aligned and make an informed investment decision.

Arca Blanca assessed the market, the operating model, the supporting technology, and the coding school teaching approach. We provided answers to the trustees and executive team and we assessed the material and significant threats and opportunities presented by the venture.  Our research and analysis helped the client to make informed decisions on whether to invest, and on what terms to maximize social and commercial value from the venture.

Creating a new business model for higher education

The client, a leading consumer software provider, has been witnessing a declining retention rate across their main customer segments. With hundreds of TB of high quality data, the opportunity to drive more value out of customer data was identified as a clear business mandate. Arca Blanca was appointed to identify the most valuable use cases that will drive performance quickly.

revenue opportunities identified by exploring and prioritising AI use cases​

An increasingly competitive market coupled with declining demand was creating significant challenges for our client in converting and retaining customers. Manual optimisation processes and the lack of data-backed ways of working were a critical blocker. Arca Blanca analysed the business and data landscape, mapped out the most strategic opportunities and outlined the scope and case for minimising churn, optimising revenues and exploring cross-sell opportunities.

The team analysed the customer lifecycle to map out challenges and opportunities and translate these into data use cases. A rapid diagnostic of data sources informed the suitability of these use cases. The outline scope of the first use case included a size of the prize, a design methodology and a delivery plan. Fast-forward to now, the business is leveraging data extensively to drive customer centricity.

Discovering new revenue streams via data exploration

This FTSE250 client’s Health division had lost competitiveness in a challenging market with inefficiencies in operational practices and contract wins with very low-margins. With revenues around £¼bn, the newly appointed managing director engaged Arca Blanca to review the operating model. The business needed to restore profitability quickly while also repositioning for sustainable growth; and the new MD sought to establish credibility and a new direction. 

Arca Blanca designed a new operating model that drove efficiency and effectiveness in winning new business, unlocking value in new contracts and manage the day-to-day business. We did this working at high tempo, parallel tracking financial analyses, high level operating model options, market assessment, and operational reviews. A joint team was formed with division leaders and their delegates, using an agile sprint-based approach to develop options and agree the way forward. 

Turnaround of £¼ billion turnover health division

The client was generating >€10bn premiums in almost 20 countries. However, fast-growing customer-centric Insurance Tech companies were disrupting core markets. The client knew they needed to change quickly. Driven by a desire to show progress, they had rushed into identifying potential acquisition targets before firming up their strategic direction. There was a real risk of creating a patchwork of disjointed capabilities and inheriting legacy technological debt.

annual insurance premiums being disrupted

Creating a platform is neither desirable nor feasible for most businesses. The remarkable success of a few large platform-based companies is more than matched by the struggles of those that didn’t survive. However, in this case there was a perfect opportunity to create a disruptive platform that would generate value for all participants.

Arca Blanca led the design of a revolutionary new platform for one of the client’s core markets. This would use the client’s scale to create an ecosystem of strategic partnerships from across their value chain. For customers, this meant a superior and hard-to-replicate proposition and experience. For the client, it would disrupt the disruptors and create a blueprint for how this legacy business could create truly defensible market positions.

The insurance platform of the future

Our client is one of the world’s largest and most ethical fashion networks. Every day, it delivers over one million items of clothing to 200 of the world’s largest fashion brands through a global network of 50 offices in 18 countries, supported by over 18,000 colleagues. Despite tremendous revenue growth, the group has seen margins reduce due to rising costs and lower prices. They needed greater economies of scale and to add superior value to partners and customers.

investment saved while delivering greater benefits faster

The rise of fast-fashion has created a complex multi-billion-pound networks of apparel retailers, product designers, fabric suppliers and garment manufacturers. One of the largest and fastest growing networks challenged Arca Blanca to look ahead 10 years and rethink the fashion value chain. We designed an ecosystem that incorporates leading technologies.

Arca Blanca was challenged to look ahead 10 years and determine what the client’s future fashion value chain should look like. The result was a complete rethink about how the fashion value chain would work. The network should become a business platform, that allowed its ecosystem of partners to plug in new capabilities and access valuable data-led insights. We laid out a clear roadmap, which saved tens of millions of pounds in investment.

Creating the fast-fashion platform of the future

Our client was reliant on third party forecasts to decide which types of specialist industrial spaces were needed and at which locations. Every year they had some sites that failed to find occupiers – tying up capital and having financial complications that could last for months or even years. This client needed a solution which would reduce uncertainty and de-risk their development appraisal process. They needed a more assured way to make their investment decisions.

anticipated cost savings across first set of sites

I wish we had this tool available when we were plotting for our last site. It would have told us to build different products. This would have saved us significant costs and eliminated the voids we have seen.

Arca Blanca developed insight and a decision-support tool that uses data science to accurately predict demand at new sites and generates site mix recommendations for how to optimise income and yields. It does this substantially better than any human could. It also provides users with an unprecedented amount of local knowledge on demographics, past & future lease events and customer segmentation; allowing more targeted marketing.

Maximising yields by predicting demand

Our client, the UK’s largest residential property manager, had an ambitious vision to become “The Nation’s Favourite Property Manager”. The business had recently received substantial private equity investment to fund growth. However, ways of working were not fit for purpose, resulting in low profitability, poor customer ratings and high staff turnover. To combat this, the business began a complex digital and operating model transformation. The CEO needed urgent support to design and deliver the programme.

Arca Blanca have done a tremendous job in designing and implementing changes that have affected our people, processes and technology platform across the organisation. Their work will allow us to turn our strategy into an operational reality, both maximising and accelerating benefits.

Being able to hit the ground running was key. In a programme which had seen previous consultants come and go, the Arca Blanca team used a data-driven approach to identify the key business levers for achieving the digital benefits case. Through close collaboration with the existing programme team, Executive Team and operational leads, we were able to embed an improved programme structure, rigour and direction. This established a clear roadmap, which renewed the support from the company’s private equity investors.

Transforming a leading property manager

A nationwide property portfolio owner and manager provided limited management services to its customers, such as repairs and maintenance. These were charged to customers through a traditional service charge mechanism. The company’s new leadership team saw an opportunity to provide additional complementary services that would meet changing customer needs and create a new area of business growth. However, the operational team had no experience of setting up or delivering new services and did not know where to begin.

annual additional revenue validated and being realised

Arca Blanca have played a critical role in setting up and driving the incubator. We started [this project] as a trial through a quick start-up incubator approach and it immediately got traction as we learned what customers liked about it and adapted. It has grown rapidly.

Arca Blanca needed to teach the client to design, test and rollout new services in a way that was low-cost and repeatable. We worked with a small team of the client’s people to set up an innovation incubator. This joint team worked with customers to develop ‘minimal viable services’ which could be used to test propositions and prices. 25 services went through the incubator, many requiring partnerships with complementary service providers. Successful services have been rolled out, and the incubation process has become embedded.

Growth through service innovation

Faced with short-term volatility and long term structural change in the automotive industry, the UK’s largest leasing company sought to use data and AI to optimise its operations, enhance its customer proposition and explore new business models. It had invested heavily in its technology stack and begun early AI experiments, but was concerned about its data maturity and the capability in the business to realise value from data at scale.

estimated top and bottom line improvements per annum

The client partnered with Arca Blanca to rapidly identify data use cases, assess their readiness to implement them and develop a roadmap to realise the benefits.

The Arca Blanca team used its tried and tested maturity assessment framework to identify high priority, actionable recommendations including: activating executive sponsorship for data, moving from an asset-centric to a customer-centric focus and implementing pragmatic data governance to promote 'data as an asset’. The team ran workshops to assess use cases including enabling Electric Vehicle transition, reducing insurance costs and increasing re-marketing margins. These outputs fed a practical, action-orientated roadmap, which gave the client the tools required to scale their data exploitation with confidence. 

Rapid data assessment & use case development

A leading software company was facing systemic decline in demand for its products. Recognising that it needed to become more customer-centric and more data-led, the business decided to implement a customer data platform. The objective was to have a single and timely view of the customer,  with one-to-one customer communications and journeys to drive ‘hyper’ personalisation and optimise the customer experience. Across the business there was uncertainty as to whether the CDXP was the right solution and had been designed in the right way in order to drive the desired outcomes.

Delivering ‘hyper’-personalisation through a CDXP

I really liked the practical approach of the AB team all through the engagement. We now have a personalisation roadmap we can believe in, and our stakeholders are starting to see the benefit.

The Arca Blanca team conducted a deep dive across different business stakeholders to identify opportunities to improve the CDXP solution and rollout. The team assessed against nine critical success factors to diagnose where there were risks and blockers across the vision, plan, governance, solution design and implementation. A clear action plan was activated to reset the programme with a focus on delivering early benefits and ensuring the CDXP would facilitate the business’ shift to become more customer-centric and data data-led.

A customer data and experience platform

A nationwide house builder was facing increased pressure on margins as competition increased and planners demanded more diverse site mixes. Putting together a residential site master plan is extremely complex and time-consuming. Our client had dozens of different house types, resulting in billions of potential combinations of layouts. The process they used to navigate this was linear and based only on historic pricing information. They knew it caused margin erosion.

average increase in profit contribution per site

This tool is going to save us substantial time and money, making us more competitive, faster to respond to bids and more accurate in our site mixes.

Arca Blanca developed a decision-support tool that predicts an optimal site mix in a matter of seconds. A complex machine learning algorithm considers over 100 local attributes (demographics, transport, employment, wealth, quality of schools etc.) along with comparable transactions to predict future demand and pricing. This is then used to calculate the most profitable plan. The tool integrates user customisations, placemaking rules and planning regulations.

Optimising master plans to maximise profit

Following profit warnings, slowing subscription revenue growth and an execution gap, a leading software company appointed a new CEO. The business needed a new way of working that would put focus on the most valuable customer segments. They needed to break away from a centralised and authoritative structure, and instead become a collaborative organisation that could solve problems and innovate rapidly.

Arca Blanca is a trusted partner of one of the world’s largest SaaS businesses. We led the design of the group operating model, which has set them on a path for double-digit annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth. At the heart of this was the philosophy of empowering colleagues through ‘Freedom within a Framework’

Arca Blanca led the design of a new multi-participant platform, based on workforce reskilling. Starting with an evaluation of citizen needs at different life stages, we considered existing competitive offers and available funding. We market-tested the value propositions for all participants, then defined and scoped the transactions on the platform with associated revenue streams. This work was supported by a detailed operating model, business case and roadmap.

Enabling a SaaS leader to prosper

A mature home developer was experiencing variable sales performance levels across its portfolio. At the worst sites, there had only been a handful of sales in the past few months, with those commanding significant discounts to list prices. Despite this, regional leaders were unable to clearly articulate what actions had been taken to improve performance, and how to prevent this from happening in the future. An immediate and sustainable intervention was needed.

Arca Blanca turned a complex problem into manageable chunks, teaching us the value of working in a more agile way to deliver faster results. From a standing start, we now have a new nationwide intervention approach up and running.

Arca Blanca was asked to turn around the performance of several slow-selling sites, spread across the country. Our work was fast, hands-on and pragmatic: looking at every element of the customer experience journey and the marketing strategy. We launched site-specific intervention activities, ruthlessly ensuring that these were executed. In parallel, we introduced a new rapid intervention approach which is now used in every region to prevent the issue from recurring.

Doubling sales through rapid interventions

A market-leading developer, owner and operator of purpose-built accommodation was looking to improve profits by better anticipating future market demands and using this insight in strategic decisions. The client was aware that their current data maturity did not allow them to act with the speed and effectiveness required. The organisation had previously been successful by relying on the ‘gut-feel’ of key individuals but were now at risk of falling behind.

new unified data roadmap designed, agreed and begun

Many businesses know they need to deliver value from data, but do not know where to start. In under one month, Arca Blanca co-developed a holistic view of data maturity and developed a unified and wide-ranging roadmap of activities that would quickly deliver value to the business. These recommendations had substantial buy-in from the organisation.

Arca Blanca performed a 1-month rapid data maturity assessment with holistic recommendations affective capabilities, ways of working and data & technology platforms. These findings were supported across the organisation. We also created a single unified roadmap to enable the client to become data-led, in parallel with progressively delivering value. As a first step, we began creating a data-driven investment-support tool that will enhance ROI.

We deliver market-leading results for our clients