October 1, 2003

US Consulting Firm to Help Develop Russian Management Style

The Chicago Process Management Group (CPMG) has been tapped by the Russian Higher School of Economics, the country’s leading educational exponent of capitalist integration, to assist as their exclusive partner in developing a process improvement management approach for Russian businesses. The university, lead by Eugeny Yassin, former Minister of Economy, offers both undergraduate and MBA level degrees in business and economics, and has taken the lead in creating the country’s first formalized management system

The Russian Higher School of Economics was created by Eugeny Yassin and Yaroslav Kuzminov in 1992 to meet the immediate and critical need for trained business managers to leverage the country’s significant natural and economic resources. The school also has relationships with the State University of New York (SUNY), the London School of Economics as well as the Sorbonne. The President of the University is Alexander Shokhin, former Vice Premier under Yeltsin and now Chairman of Renaissance Capital.

CPMG (formerly Prizm Solutions) has recently acquired TechnoConsult, a Russian-based technology consulting company, which has successfully implemented R&D projects for Dow Chemical, Samsung, and LG in that country.

The goal of this new partnership between the Russian Higher School of Economics and CPMG will be to create an approach that will take advantage of existing manufacturing capabilities in Russia, and through application of new techniques and improvement approaches developed by CPMG, advance the country’s capabilities to a world-class competitive level. "We selected CPMG as our partner," said Sergey Filonovich, Dean of the university’s Business School, "because we need their background in real-world experience and most importantly, real-world success."

In the US, the focus of CPMG has been to evaluate existing work process infrastructures and then to deliver high-value outcomes for limited effort, using an ROI of 5:1 as their approach basis. Key to the company’s success is their combination of work process experts and unique database improvement results from over 250 "FORTUNE 500" companies.

CPMG regards the emerging Russian market to be "critical to the growth of the global market," according to Bruce Marshall, its Managing Partner, "and the role of the Higher School of Economics will be fundamental to its success. There are significant opportunities in Russia, and we are pleased to be playing a role."

For more information contact: Mary Stibal, VP Business Development and Communications, 617.794.6200