Christian Heiss

Partner, Oliver Wyman

Dr. Christian Heiss is a Partner in Oliver Wyman’s EMEA Operations practice, where he specializes in product cost optimization. His work involves partnering with clients to re-shape their products to significantly improve cost competitiveness. This includes product development, purchasing, and production.

I’ve always been fascinated by finding creative solutions to problems, particularly for reducing product costs. Offshoring is one obvious approach, but often there are far better ways to gain efficiencies if you rethink the sources of cost with the actual products themselves.

Christian advises his clients in making the best product realization decisions and implementing them in the most effective way. He often looks across industries for answers to complex problems. This includes mass production (such as automotive, white goods and small consumer products), or small series manufacturing (such as trains, planes, machinery, or wind towers), and also single piece customer/use specific products (such as satellites and space equipment, or industrial plants). 

There are notable similarities about how you can reduce product costs for cars, trains, and planes. But we’ve taken this one step further and have applied some of our thinking to areas such as satellites. Understandably here the efficiency gains can be significant, but the stakes are also higher, therefore it is critical to ensure that any changes to products don’t impact factors such as safety or life cycle cost.