Our Clients

ECSA provides advisory services to private sector clients and public agencies at the regional, national and supranational government levels. Past and present clients in the public sphere include the Flemish port authorities, the Flemish Government (inter alia, the Ministry of Mobility and Public Works), Provincial governments, municipalities, the port authority of Rotterdam, the port authority of Brussels, etc.  Many of them are repeat clients, who have used ECSA’s services since it was established in 1995.



Our Domain

ECSA mainly conducts economic and strategic studies in the planning phase, for instance in the realm of large-scale capital expenditure (CAPEX) projects. These projects are assessed in terms of their socio-economic viability and economic return. ECSA uses analytical tools such as social cost benefit analysis, the regional economic impact study and multi-criteria analysis. ECSA has also been active in designing policy scenario’s, policy-driven strategies, and actionable policy tools. ECSA is regularly involved in EU-level advisory projects and has extensive experience with the complex rules and guidelines associated with executing these types of projects.

Many studies that ECSA has completed have revolved around the port and transport sectors, or have addressed challenges in the broader realm of complex logistics activities and global value chains, including industry relocation, brownfield redevelopment, the circular economy, etc.



ECSA: Foundations for Strategic Advisory Services

Even before the company’s establishment in 1995, ECSA’s experts provided intellectual guidance to a large number of organizations in the private sector and in the public sphere to help them realize their potential to create stakeholder value through strategic projects.

In the realm of international strategic management and sustainability strategies, we focus on assisting companies and public institutions adjust to the new economic realities emerging from turbulence in the global environment and from shifting stakeholder demands.

Higher volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) are now a way of life, and this will be the only constant in the foreseeable future. It has become much more difficult in any sector to keep expected strategic project performance satisfactory relative to capital, human and technology inputs. Most organizations face the continued challenge of having to create value for a variety of stakeholders, whereby this is often possible only through management innovation when planning for new strategic projects.

Our advice is always guided by the simple principle of maximizing performance for the organization and its stakeholders, thereby focusing on four elements in strategic projects: (1) efficiency and (2) effectiveness of current operations, (3) innovation, and (4) the fair distribution of costs and benefits among stakeholders. We systematically use these four criteria when we bring ideas, concepts and insight from experience to the table, to help senior leadership respond to key challenges and to improve the quality of their decision-making and execution on strategic projects.

Visioning

Stakeholders can confer extraordinary reputational capital to some organizations, whereas others do not benefit from such status. In many cases, visionary leadership is the key to explaining this difference. 

Visionary leadership in action increases stakeholders’ respect for the organization and its way of doing things. ECSA assists senior leadership to think boldly about their organizations’ strategic projects, in the context of those initiatives it is invited to support.  ECSA aims to enhance visioning capacity, thereby eliminating organizational barriers to creative project planning and proposing pathways for the disciplined execution of well-designed strategic projects.

Strategic Management

Does strategic project management matter?

ECSA supports organizations crafting the best possible strategic projects, especially for large capital expenditures, with these strategic projects’ features reflecting deep insight into what drives value for the organization and its stakeholders. Strategic project management is about making the whole worth more than its parts.

Successful organizations understand that the process of crafting a strategic project, especially in the context of large capital expenditures, is just as important to subsequent disciplined execution as the content of the projects themselves.

The value added of ECSA’s approach includes support for:

• Improved strategy insight as to where the sector or market is going, based on better information on what stakeholders really value
• More flexible and rapid acting upon those strategic project opportunities that can create value for the organization and its stakeholders
• Faster and more effective responses to changes in the VUCA environment, through eliminating internal barriers to good strategic project development (such as an excessive short-term focus), dysfunctional incrementalism, and unfortunate blind spots created by the organizational structure and systems

Disciplined Execution

Once a decision on a strategic project has been made, the question arises as to what it will take to deliver superior outcomes for the organization and its stakeholders. Disciplined execution is the key to superior outcomes.  

ECSA helps organizations transform great decisions on strategic projects into superior outcomes for the organization itself and for its stakeholders. The value added of ECSA’s approach includes support for:

• Clear alignment among all stakeholders on what the strategic project is meant to achieve, to keep the organization focused on key goals
• Grounded ‘causes – effects’ analysis to give senior leadership an in-depth understanding of the performance that can reasonably be achieved with the strategic project that is being considered or has been approved
• Focused resource allocation to ensure resource alignment with the strategic project decision made, and deployment towards the highest value creation for stakeholders
• Disciplined performance monitoring that enables management to identify problems early and engage in corrective action to keep the strategic project execution on track

Stakeholder Value

ECSA’s experience identifies two keys to sustained stakeholder satisfaction with strategic projects.

First, success in creating stakeholder value reflects the competence to understand what the stakeholders really value and are willing to pay for (or support), and what strategic project designs they will respond to most positively.

Second, stakeholder value must be accompanied with value for the organization itself. 

The value added of ECSA’s approach includes support for:

• Improved insight into stakeholder preferences with more integrative information on stakeholder behaviors and choice drivers, and the implications thereof for organizational outcomes
• Organizational systems and governance approaches geared at overcoming internal and external resistance to strategic projects

Risk Management

ECSA’s view is that measuring risk associated with strategic projects is necessary to generate a complete perspective on expected organizational and stakeholder outcomes. Some risks are difficult to control. Actively identifying and managing risks is one of senior leadership’s main tasks in its pursuit of sustainable value creation.

The value added of ECSA’s approach includes support for:

• Focusing senior leadership’s attention on systematically identifying controllable and non-controllable risks associated with strategic projects
• Aligning the organization’s leadership around a common vision on what constitutes acceptable versus unacceptable risk with strategic projects
• Providing tools such as stakeholder based, multi-criteria analysis (S-MCA) to gain comprehensive information and insight into where risks are created and how they could potentially endanger the viability of a strategic project
• Developing risk-mitigating strategies for outcome improvement through a variety of input-level risk shifting mechanisms (e.g., by engaging stakeholders as early as possible) and output-level pass-through measures and routines (e.g., by making sure that costs to stakeholders do not disproportionally accrue to one group only)