Services
StepChange is ready to support its clients with their most pressing business challenges. Our service portfolio covers the key processes across the whole supply chain.
Today’s paper and forest value chain faces rising raw material competition, price pressure, increasing order complexity with shorter lead times, persistent overcapacity, volatile energy costs, growing sustainability demands, and talent challenges.
StepChange has helped many industry players define and refine their strategies. Many companies struggle with their positioning and portfolios, balancing asset capacities and footprints with demand, cost inflation (fiber, energy, logistics), and rising sustainability and regulatory pressure.
The most successful players consistently demonstrate:
- Secured, low-cost fiber access with focused, efficient assets
- Operational excellence to manage cost volatility and margin pressure
- Differentiated products and service to protect pricing and customer loyalty
- Commercial and supply chain excellence, enabling reliability, speed, and lower total cost for customers
- Clear market positioning, with leadership in selected segments or regions
Based on these factors, strategic choices must balance integration, portfolio focus, and market positioning. StepChange supports in sharpening strategy and, critically, ensuring disciplined execution.
StepChange supports across the full M&A lifecycle, combining strategic insight with deep operational due diligence to enable informed decisions and sustainable returns.
M&A remains a key lever to reshape portfolios and drive consolidation across the pulp, paper, and packaging industry, with continued focus on packaging growth segments and rationalization in structurally challenged areas. Increasing competition for attractive assets, evolving investor expectations, and stricter return requirements make disciplined strategy and execution critical.
Robust, tailored due diligence is essential to navigate this environment, challenging assumptions, identifying real synergies, and assessing operational, market, and integration risks. Successful transactions depend not only on selecting the right targets, but on validating value creation and ensuring effective post-merger execution.
Ultimately, value is created not in the deal, but in execution. StepChange has deep expertise in end-to-end post-merger integration, ensuring synergies are captured and translated into sustainable performance improvement.
Successful acquisitions are defined by disciplined, fast integration, yet many still fail to deliver expected value. Typical pitfalls include unclear synergy validation, cultural misalignment, slow decision-making, and an inward focus that neglects customers, suppliers, and day-to-day operations.
In today’s environment, speed and execution rigor are critical. Delayed integration, unclear accountability, and weak data transparency can quickly erode value, leading to cost leakage, customer disruption, and missed synergies.
Best-in-class integrations are built on fact-based pre-deal planning, with clearly quantified synergies, realistic implementation roadmaps, and early alignment on operating models and leadership. A structured 100-day plan, supported by strong governance, real-time KPI tracking, and increasingly digital/AI-enabled transparency, ensures focus and pace.
Equally important is clear communication and decisive leadership, addressing tough topics early, maintaining external focus, and driving accountability across the organization.
StepChange supports in designing and implementing tailored performance management systems that turn strategy into execution.
Aligning daily operations with strategy remains a core challenge, especially as companies face margin pressure, cost volatility, and increasing complexity. Many performance systems still fail to translate strategy into clear, actionable targets on the shop floor.
Effective alignment requires cascading company objectives into clear, KPI-driven targets at plant, team, and individual level, linked to operational and financial outcomes. This must combine top-down direction with bottom-up validation to ensure relevance and accountability.
Leading organizations embed real-time performance tracking, transparency, and ownership, enabling faster decision-making and continuous improvement.
StepChange supports organizations in making innovation practical, scalable and economically impactful.
Innovation is critical to remain competitive amid margin pressure, evolving customer demands, and accelerating digital and AI disruption. Innovation projects combine pragmatic frameworks with data- and AI-driven insights to turn ideas into measurable value.
The focus is on prioritizing high-impact opportunities, rapidly prototyping and scaling solutions, and embedding innovation into daily operations, directly linking it to cost, growth and sustainability targets. This includes AI use cases, process automation, new product development and circular solutions.
By combining industry expertise with a hands-on approach, StepChange enables teams to move from ideation to execution faster, unlocking tangible value and building a culture of continuous, results-driven innovation.
StepChange supports companies from rapid diagnostic to implementation, using analytics, benchmarking and on-site assessment to identify performance gaps and enable fact-based decisions on improvement, restructuring or exit.
Many companies in the sector operate with low or no profitability, driven by structural challenges or operational inefficiencies. StepChange has delivered numerous turnaround and profit improvement projects, with a proven methodology at the core of many engagements.
Where a turnaround is viable, focused, management-backed programs are implemented, delivering quick wins and sustainable improvements to restore profitability.
Building effective organizations through benchmarking and rightsizing, and strengthening workforce capabilities to drive sustainable performance improvement and successful transformation.
StepChange leverages an organizational benchmark database across functions and businesses to quickly pinpoint deviations and develop targeted organizational blueprints.
Benchmarking company performance is the compass guiding strategic growth. It provides a clear basis for improvement by analyzing industry standards, identifying strengths and uncovering opportunities. It is not just about where a company stands, but about using insights to drive improvement and strengthen competitive advantage.
StepChange supports organizations in assessing structures and guiding transformation.
Many pulp and paper companies have restructured to streamline operations, focus on core activities and reduce headcount. However, aligning processes, functions and resources into a cohesive system remains a challenge.
Organizations are typically structured by business units or market segments, supported by central functions such as Finance and HR. While this enables profit ownership, it often limits cross-divisional integration, particularly in Supply Chain Management, leading to imbalances and excess inventories.
Building an effective organization requires alignment with company goals through benchmarking and process analysis. Based on performance gaps, business processes and organizational models are defined.
Successful implementation depends on early employee involvement, clear targets and a structured performance management framework.
StepChange supports organizations in unlocking workforce potential, strengthening performance, resilience and long-term success.
Optimizing people performance is pivotal for organizational success. Our projects in this area are designed to elevate workforce capabilities, fostering a culture of excellence and collaboration. Through tailored strategies and comprehensive assessments, we support teams in reaching their full potential, improving productivity and satisfaction.
Our approach integrates proven methodologies and targeted development plans, aligning individual goals with organizational objectives. From leadership enhancement to skill development, we address key aspects of human capital to enable engaged, high-performing teams.
StepChange equips teams with practical tools and support, turning potential roadblocks into stepping stones for success and ensuring that change is sustained over time.
Change Management is not just a checkbox; it is the fuel that powers successful projects. Change Management focuses on making change happen, working closely with teams to develop practical strategies that deliver results and ensure smooth implementation.
We focus on the root causes of performance gaps, establish and set targets based on clear business cases and drive solutions engineering and implementation forward. The process is supported by stringent methodology, structured roles & responsibilities and achieving defined milestones.
Operational excellence is the single largest lever to improve bottom-line profits in a production environment, achieved through reducing variability, increasing efficiency, and optimizing production and maintenance processes.
StepChange helps companies reduce process variability through analytics, benchmarking, process standardization, best practice implementation, and adoption support through training and workshops. StepChange’s approach typically delivers productivity gains of 2–8%.
Despite significant investment in control and quality systems, many companies fail to fully leverage their data. While productivity and consumption are often tracked, key opportunities such as process standardization and data-driven decision-making remain underutilized. Advanced analytics, machine learning and AI offer further potential to improve operational performance, and StepChange has developed and implemented relevant digital use cases.
To sustain improvements, a structured management cycle for monitoring, controlling and rewarding performance is required.
StepChange offers a holistic approach to maintenance transformation, typically achieving a 5–15% reduction in maintenance spend.
Maintenance costs are a major driver of operating expenses but often remain unchallenged due to fears of production downtime. StepChange leverages maintenance benchmarks for costs and headcount across the industry to quickly pinpoint improvement opportunities. In addition, we conduct shop floor workshadowing, process reviews and gemba walks to assess maintenance productivity and identify actionable improvements.
Despite advancements in technology, core maintenance processes and organizations have seen little change. Key issues include poor coordination between production, engineering and maintenance, leading to inefficiencies and increased reactive maintenance. Costs often escalate due to outdated practices, standalone maintenance operations, costly external services and informal procurement.
To improve effectiveness and reduce costs, key levers include:
- Defining a maintenance strategy
- Prioritizing equipment service levels
- Managing spare parts and outsourcing options
- Standardizing service and spares management
- Reviewing roles, responsibilities and performance metrics
- Evaluating resource needs and shift patterns
A shift in budget responsibility to asset managers can drive efficiency by creating a checks-and-balances system. Training and workshops are essential to support implementation.
Supply chain management aligns supply and demand across the value chain to deliver reliable service at lowest total cost.
StepChange supports end-to-end supply chain transformations, typically delivering 20–40% inventory reductions, 3–8% in SCM cost savings, and service level improvements of up to 40%.
In the pulp, paper, and packaging industry, supply chain management is a critical lever to manage demand volatility, high working capital, and cost pressure across fiber sourcing, production, and distribution. Many players still operate with fragmented planning and limited transparency, leading to excess inventories, suboptimal production schedules, and avoidable logistics costs.
Leading companies are moving toward integrated, end-to-end planning, combining advanced demand forecasting, real-time data visibility, and increasingly AI-enabled optimization to synchronize sales, production, and logistics. This enables shorter lead times, improved service levels, lower inventories, and reduced cost-to-serve, while supporting sustainability targets through optimized transport and reduced waste.
StepChange supports companies in designing and implementing end-to-end, digitally enabled planning solutions, leveraging advanced analytics and AI to improve cost, service levels, and asset efficiency.
Market leaders are redesigning planning to manage volatility, cost pressure, and increasing complexity, while laggards struggle with high inventories, poor asset utilization, and weak service levels. Competitive advantage requires integrated planning across demand, fiber sourcing, production, and logistics, combining data-driven demand planning, cross-site balancing (S&OP/IBP), and synchronized production scheduling.
Leading companies are moving toward real-time transparency and AI-supported decision-making, enabling shorter lead times, lower working capital, and more reliable mill operations.
StepChange supports companies in end-to-end strategic category sourcing, typically delivering 4–15% savings depending on category, while improving resilience, supplier performance, and cost transparency. With deep specialization in the pulp, paper, and packaging industry, StepChange is a partner of choice for critical categories such as pulp, wood, recycled fiber, chemicals, and packaging materials, bringing expert- and data-driven TCO optimization across price, usage, and process.
Strategic sourcing today combines market intelligence, data analytics, and structured supplier management to create sustainable value amid cost volatility and supply risks. StepChange applies an industry-specific sourcing and category management methodology, leveraging advanced analytics and AI-supported tools to identify savings, mitigate risks, and strengthen supplier collaboration, turning procurement into a key driver of margin and resilience.
Tactical procurement and rapid action sourcing ensure operational continuity and immediate value capture in volatile markets. StepChange supports organizations in stabilizing spend quickly, leveraging market intelligence, competitive tension, and fast, structured sourcing approaches to unlock short-term savings of 4–12% while mitigating supply risks.
StepChange’s approach combines streamlined processes, digital tools, and clear governance to accelerate decision-making, improve compliance, and increase transparency across spend. Rapid action initiatives focus on quick wins, including renegotiations, spot sourcing, demand management, and specification adjustments, delivering immediate impact on cost and cash.
This enables companies to reduce purchasing costs, improve supplier performance, and optimize inventories within weeks, while building the foundation for more strategic procurement improvements.
In an asset-intensive industry, volume is a key driver of profitability. Contracting global demand puts sales managers in the spotlight, making visibility and control in customer management critical. Accurate, up-to-date customer insight is essential to retain customers, manage risk and improve margins.
StepChange offers a two-phase revenue retention and margin improvement program, helping clients recapture 0.5–1.5% in margins while reducing risks of bad debt and customer churn. The first phase targets immediate actions to prevent customer loss and stop margin leakages, while the second phase focuses on sustainable practices to build structures, processes and offerings that enhance long-term customer loyalty.
Creating customer loyalty requires a customer-centric strategy and a deep understanding of customer needs. During a recession, retaining customers becomes even more critical as volumes decrease and additional losses must be avoided. To succeed long-term, maintaining and expanding market share with a focus on profitability is essential.
StepChange helps companies establish clear segmentation criteria to determine customer value and profitability, ensuring consistent service differentiation and maximizing profitability. Based on these segments, standard services are defined and additional services are offered with appropriate charges. Projects typically address over-servicing and undercharging, helping to capture lost value.
The “Achilles Heel” for many pulp and paper companies is not fully understanding the true profitability of individual customers and failing to quickly adjust the service packages they pay for. Effective customer segmentation and service level management are key.
Customer segmentation involves identifying subsets of buyers with similar needs and behaviors, allowing sellers to tailor their approach and services accordingly. However, many companies lack objective criteria for segmentation, leading to inconsistent service differentiation left to individual salespeople. This results in some customers being over-serviced or undercharged, causing financial losses.
StepChange helps companies streamline product portfolios, resulting in higher service levels, improved margins and reduced supply chain complexity.
In every industry, including pulp and paper, increasing customer demands lead to a growing range of products and services, impacting the supply chain from demand planning to operations. Avoiding over-servicing is critical, as it can lead to rising service costs not covered by customers.
A streamlined portfolio offers multiple benefits, including reduced inventory levels and write-offs, improved lead times, higher transport utilization, and simpler supply chain and order handling processes.
Maintaining a balanced product portfolio requires understanding product profitability, cross-selling potential, and regularly consolidating the product catalog. However, efforts often stall due to the complexity of managing large numbers of SKUs and the continuous introduction of new products.
A continuous product assessment process is required, similar to retail practices where products are regularly evaluated for profitability, including identifying high-margin products, reassessing low-profit items and actively managing the product lifecycle.
StepChange specializes in identifying and addressing key value levers in pricing, helping companies capture untapped value and improve margins.
Paper and packaging companies often struggle with situational pricing, typically setting prices based on “the market” rather than customer-specific data. Sales teams may hesitate to apply differentiated pricing due to a lack of analytical insight into client cost drivers, leading to weak negotiation positions.
This results in an inconsistent pricing approach with limited differentiation, causing margin loss and increasing risk during economic downturns. Transparent pricing also requires consistency, as low prices for one customer can impact others.
Customers are often over-serviced, receiving more than standard or additional unpaid services, leading to margin losses. This is driven by limited integration of supply chain data, lack of transparency in transactional costs, unclear customer strategies and misaligned sales incentives.
Managing prices and margins based on comprehensive supply chain data is key to generating value. Understanding transactional cost drivers enables better decisions and stronger customer negotiations.
StepChange supports companies in optimizing sales channels to improve effectiveness and profitability, enabling rapid margin improvement and long-term strategic positioning.
Selling profitably in a commodity industry is challenging due to shifting volumes, increased transparency and evolving customer expectations. Selecting the right sales channels is critical to maintain profitability, with e-commerce becoming an increasingly important channel alongside traditional models.
Redefining roles in the value chain requires thorough analysis and scenario modeling to anticipate future developments and define a competitive channel strategy. Effective sales channels target specific customer segments, maximize sales, minimize costs and provide appropriate service levels.
Channel selection should be based on customer needs, costs, benefits and strategic goals. Customer segmentation based on profitability and requirements enables more efficient and targeted service. Each segment’s needs should be matched with value propositions that meet profitability constraints and specific process requirements.
A strong balance sheet is a key edge in capital-intensive industries; StepChange drives 20–30% working capital reduction, higher ROCE, and lower gearing.
StepChange Consulting enhances cash flow and achieves working capital reductions of 20–30% through operational improvements.
Managing payables and receivables may seem basic, but in today’s competitive market, deeper analysis is required to unlock value. While many companies focus on this area, true impact lies in the underlying processes and data.
Common beliefs, such as reluctance to enforce earlier payments or concerns around pricing impact, often limit effectiveness. In practice, efforts are frequently misdirected toward adjusting terms or chasing overdue accounts too late.
Improvement potential lies in internal processes, data quality and clear responsibilities. Many ERP systems lack sufficient business rules, missing opportunities in dunning and overdue management, while reliance on sales teams can lead to suboptimal outcomes.
A structured setup with clear roles for back-office and finance functions enables better enforcement of terms without compromising sales. Aligning incentives with working capital targets is also critical to improve cash flow.
StepChange applies a pragmatic and sustainable Zero-Based Budgeting framework that avoids over-complication and over-academization, enabling companies to identify significant optimization and savings opportunities.
A Zero-Based approach helps to avoid over-budgeting, “gold-plating” and sandbagging by requiring full transparency and justification of costs.
Principles of Zero-Based Budgeting:
- All expenses have to be justified for each new period
- Funding is allocated based on real requirements and prioritized initiatives
- Budgets are defined based on actual needs for the upcoming period, independent of the previous budget
StepChange’s independent benchmarks – across operations, processes, and organization – enable full-company comparison and quickly reveal gaps and improvement opportunities.
StepChange B3NCH provides you with comprehensive financial benchmarks, covering seven peer groups – Packaging, Graphic Paper, Specialty Paper, Pulp, Tissue, Flexibles, and Wood.
StepChange uses operational benchmarking to identify performance gaps, define best practices and set clear targets for continuous improvement.
Operational benchmarking offers much more than just a comparison to other players; it also serves as a continuously evolving target for internal operations to achieve sustainable performance. It pinpoints operational efficiencies, revealing industry best practices and performance gaps. It is a tool that drives action, enabling teams to optimize processes and stay ahead in a competitive landscape.
StepChange leverages an organizational benchmark database across functions and businesses to quickly pinpoint deviations and develop targeted organizational blueprints.
Benchmarking company performance is the compass guiding strategic growth. It provides a clear basis for improvement by analyzing industry standards, identifying strengths and uncovering opportunities. It is not just about where a company stands, but about using insights to drive improvement and strengthen competitive advantage.
StepChange is an industry thought leader in digital and AI strategy, at the forefront of transforming the fiber value chain, combining deep industry expertise with advanced analytics and AI to pinpoint and capture digital value.
StepChange helps you drive digital and AI transformation in:
> Strategy & roadmap
> Value identification & AI use cases
> Process automation & AI integration
> Organizational implications
> End-to-end transformation execution
