Starr & Associates Management Consulting
Driving Critical Decisions with Better Business Intelligence

Starr & Associates is a management consulting firm that specializes in helping large enterprises improve their top and bottom-line performance. They do this by leveraging process mastery, operational excellence, technology management, and business intelligence and data analytics. What sets Starr & Associates apart from its competitors is its unique ability to provide solutions to clients with smaller teams, thanks to its expertise in managing, analyzing, and extrapolating insights from large data sets fundamental to its client’s operations.

The firm serves clients in various industries, including utility and energy, manufacturing, technology, telecommunications, and financial services. Clients typically engage the firm because they have encountered cost implications or significant demand shifts from customers that their current operations and processes are not mature enough to handle. Others seek to transform their operations in a cost-effective way to outperform their competitors and capture more market segments.

Terron Wright, a Principal Consultant, heads the business intelligence & analytics practices, which offers a full range of technical services to help clients with their problems. These services include strategic alignment, delivering end-to-end solutions, data analysis, data mining, data sourcing, data blending, integration, custom development, identifying critical performance indicators, data quality management, data governance, advanced analytics, and interactive data visualization. In addition, the firm takes a business discovery-driven approach to understand the business of its clients and to ensure the solution meets their intended needs.

When a client approaches Starr & Associates with a particular requirement, the consulting firm follows a repeatable approach that can be implemented in a scrum, agile or hybrid approach. The first step is to define the scope of the problem the client is trying to solve. The firm then seeks to understand the client’s business, objectives, and scope. After a planning phase, the consulting team starts digging into the actual requirements and documents them as use cases or highlevel requirements, which guides the developments. The consulting firm’s aim is to deliver a minimal viable product (MVP) from the start and see how that resonates with the client. Then, the team can expand on the MVP per the client’s needs.

Starr & Associates’ discovery phase approach involves solicitation efforts, discovery workshops, and pre-work questionnaires to help understand the client’s problems better. The firm also asks to see the client’s process flows, data model(s), information flow diagrams, and relevant reports, to digest all the information and build a current state before moving forward. During elicitation efforts, the consulting firm leverages best practices and experiences with other companies and industries to gain a better understanding of where the client wants to go. Overall, Starr & Associates has a robust onboarding process that helps clients understand their unique requirements and guides them through each stage of the consulting process.

Starr and Associates take pride in delivering innovative solutions for clients in various industries. Two cases showcase the company’s ability to understand unique client needs and build customized solutions that help clients make informed decisions. In one case, a healthcare industry client struggled to identify risks within their supply chain and needed a better end-to-end view of their performance. In response, Starr and Associates implemented an endto- end analytics solution that included collecting, integrating, and cleansing data from various sources, utilizing an agnostic data model and a predictive risk model for advanced analytics, and incorporating interactive dashboards for quick issue identification and data-driven decision-making. In another case, Starr and Associates worked with a heavily regulated banking company that needed a tailored solution. The consulting firm delivered a cloud-based data warehousing and business element solution that helped the client better manage their risk and revenue.

Measuring success is critical to any consulting engagement, and it is no different for Starr and Associates. While their approach varies from client to client, they have a standard that they adhere to for every project.

They ensure high-level strategic thought leaders and principals are involved in every engagement, at every level. In addition to this, the agility of their senior resources is a key source of cost savings and project risk mitigation, allowing for quick adaptation to changing circumstances and challenges. They also measure their success by staying on task and on plan with the project plan, delivering a solution that meets the client’s needs, and saving the client money on resources.

One of the ways that Starr and Associates measure success is by aligning a cost-saving to an operational process. For example, they helped one of their larger clients reduce unnecessary transactions, which saved them millions of dollars. This is a straightforward and easy way to measure operational cost saving. They also gauge success by listening to client feedback and delivering timely solutions.

Our solutions are designed to be user-friendly and easy to understand. We use a three-pronged approach, including discovery, understanding, and design-to-deploy, to help clients achieve measurable improvements in productivity, efficiency, and profitability

Before taking on an engagement, Starr and Associates ensure that there is an associated business case that supports the effort. They prioritize their efforts around initiatives they know will generate a tangible impact for their clients. They measure their success quantitatively using business intelligence and data analytics tools to track actual change across the enterprise. They also follow up qualitatively by touching base with project stakeholders and key personnel to ensure that the quality expectations were met and that the expected outcomes were achieved throughout the process.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, companies must identify what sets them apart from their competitors. Starr & Associates has been successful in this regard via its unique staffing matrix and focus on service, agility, diversity, and expertise.

The staffing matrix is structured in a way that heavily relies on the experience and wisdom of its resources. The engagement of senior consultants adds value to project delivery, resulting in lower budgets, reduced timeline risks, and fewer disrupted scopes. The firm also believes in diversifying its human resources regarding ethnicity, gender, educational background, and career point, enabling it to provide diverse perspectives and better service to clients.

Finally, Starr & Associates expects its consultants to have mastery of what they call the “three legs of the stool.” These are process operations, business intelligence & data analytics, and change management. This approach allows them to build more efficient teams on behalf of their clients, which means they can do more with fewer personnel and less human capital applied.

Starr & Associates distinguishes itself from competitors by offering cutting-edge solutions that optimize processes, deliver operational excellence, leverage advanced technology, and provide business intelligence and data analytics. Their solutions are developed under the guidance of senior resource thought leadership, enabling them to offer clients innovative solutions that meet their unique needs and challenges while achieving cost savings and maximizing ROI. With a robust client onboarding process and a focus on agile methodologies, digital transformation, diversity, and thought leadership, Starr & Associates is leading the way in delivering innovative and scalable solutions for clients across a diverse range of industries. As the consulting landscape evolves and the pace of change accelerates, Starr & Associates is committed to leveraging emerging technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, and Advanced Analytics to provide even more impactful solutions for its clients in the future.