Mock-up of a business strategy paper titled 'Unlock Millions by Making Your Organization Leaner and Faster' featuring a blue and orange abstract network graphic representing interconnected nodes and efficiency improvements for consulting firms.
Target Operating Model
16.06.2025 | Strategy Paper

Unlock Organizational Efficiency

Transform complexity into advantage

Discover how to streamline your organization for improved speed and performance, boosting margins and enhancing competitiveness.

Is your organization built for what comes next?

As businesses grow, so do structures, hierarchies, and processes. Over time, this creates complexity that slows things down: decision-making, execution, and ultimately growth. 

Our new Strategy Paper shows how leading companies are transforming this complexity into a competitive advantage: by making their organizations leaner and faster.

The challenge: growth creates friction

In today’s business environment, companies face vastly different pressures. Some are growing rapidly, others are fighting to stay profitable in shrinking markets. But one challenge is universal: organizational structures have quietly become more complex than effective.

Inefficiencies build up. Responsibilities blur. Governance becomes slow. And before you know it, the structure no longer fits the strategy. Whether you’re trying to scale with your current workforce, protect margins, or restructure to stay competitive — efficiency has become a key business driver. 

A roadmap to organizational efficiency

This Strategy Paper offers a proven approach to reduce complexity, unlock hidden capacity and realign the organization with business needs. Using the H&Z Target Operating Model, we outline how to increase margin per employee by 10–20% through smart structural decisions.The paper defines three typical organizational situations (growth, optimization, downsizing)  and shows how to tackle each with tailored efficiency levers. From clarifying roles to simplifying governance, from reducing non-value-adding activities to embedding cultural change — we help organizations shift from friction to focus.

3 Key Takeaways

  • Match Plan for Efficiency
    Understand your current ‘game’ and build a match plan that aligns organizational structure with market realities

  • Target Operating Model (TOM) as Roadmap
    Use H&Z’s proven TOM framework to identify inefficiencies and activate levers across structure, governance, and processes

  • Industry-Specific Solutions

    From defence to automotive: tailor strategies to your industry dynamics — growth, stagnation or contraction

Download our Paper here

Contact Our Experts

Patrik Soltendieck

Partner
Patrik Soltendieck

Dr. Markus Contzen

Partner
Markus leads H&Z’s Private Equity industry with over 20 years of experience across the full investment lifecycle driving measurable value creation. As a Partner, he also supports H&Z’s focus on Operational Excellence.
Dr. Markus Contzen

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