ACOPI Group Consulting — A Low-Cost Extension Model for Colombia's Auto-Parts SMEs

Colombia's auto-parts suppliers -- first- and second-tier firms to the automobile industry -- have long struggled with weak management practices that cap productivity. In 2014, the World Bank partnered with ACOPI, Colombia's national association of micro, small and medium enterprises, to test whether better management could be taught cheaply enough to reach small firms at scale.
159 eligible firms, more than half of them in the Cundinamarca region around Bogotá and the rest concentrated in Valle (Cali), Antioquia and the Eje Cafetero, were randomly split into three arms of 53 firms each: a control group that received only an initial management diagnostic, an individual-consulting group given five specialists (logistics, HR, finance, marketing, production) over 4-6 months, and a group-consulting arm that put 5-6 non-competing firms together with a single consultant, modelled on agricultural-extension peer learning.
Both consulting arms raised measured management practices by 8 to 10 percentage points relative to control -- statistically indistinguishable from each other. But group consulting cost about $10,000 per firm, roughly a third of the individual-consulting price tag, so on a cost-benefit basis it dominated: the World Bank's ex-ante estimate had the group treatment paying for itself within roughly a year. A follow-up study revisiting the same firms 8-10 years later found the gains in management practices and profits had persisted, evidence the improvements were not a short-lived Hawthorne effect.
Caveats: the sample is a single, oligopsonistic sector (auto-parts suppliers to a handful of assemblers) in one country, and 159 firms is a modest base for extrapolating national impact -- the evaluators themselves frame the result as proof of a cost-effective delivery model rather than a ready-to-scale national programme.

Read the full analysis: https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/528