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.

To test whether individual or group business consulting could raise management practices and profits among small auto-parts suppliers, and to compare the cost-effectiveness of the two delivery models.

159 eligible firms, more than half in the Cundinamarca region around Bogotá and the rest in Valle (Cali), Antioquia and the Eje Cafetero, were randomly split into three arms of 53 firms each: a control group receiving 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 putting 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. Group consulting cost about $10,000 per firm, roughly a third of the individual-consulting price tag. A follow-up study revisiting the same firms 8-10 years later found the gains in management practices and profits had persisted.

Group consulting matched individual consulting's effect on management practices at roughly a third of the cost, and the World Bank's ex-ante estimate had the group treatment paying for itself within roughly a year. The evaluators frame the result as proof of a cost-effective delivery model rather than a ready-to-scale national programme, given the modest single-sector, single-country sample.