Mark Fagan

Mark Fagan General Information

Biography

Mr. Mark Fagan serves as Founding Partner at Norbridge. He works with clients in the transportation, telecommunications and utility industries as they grapple with increasing shareholder value in a deregulated world. His engagements include driving top line improvements from volume growth and pricing optimization. He also conducts assignments focused on cost elimination/reengineering. He has streamlined functions ranging from customer service to finance to operations. He also assists clients optimize their infrastructure, especially in light of evolving competition. He has conducted a wide array of studies for his railroad clients. He facilitated a long-range strategy for a Class I railroad. His team developed an outlook for the external environment (economic growth, modal competition, and the regulatory environment) and detailed forecasts for revenue growth and operating expenses for each Class I railroad. With this foundation information, he facilitated the definition of the long-term strategy for the client. The project culminated with Mr. Fagan and the CFO presenting the strategy to the client's board of directors. He also completed a root cause analysis of a Class I's poor service reliability. Through micro-level data analysis, Mr. Fagan was able to unwind the chain of performance problems. The identification of the root issues led to a refocusing on the critical set of measures. Other rail work included working with a major railroad to develop its coal strategy in light of the external environment for producing and consuming coal ranging from the sale of Powder River Basin coal to Eastern United States power plants and the impact of regulations on mountain top removal. Mr. Fagan also has distinctive competence in strategic sourcing and purchasing. His purchasing work focuses on reengineering the acquisition process to ensure lowest total cost of ownership. In an assignment for a global technology company, Mr. Fagan reengineered the fragmented purchasing function into an enterprise-wide procurement community that leveraged the company's worldwide volume, eliminated low-value paper processing activities, and integrated purchasing into the entire acquisition cycle. Through this assignment and work for other clients in the transportation, utility, and manufacturing, Mr. Fagan has developed a purchasing best practices composite that he uses to benchmark client purchasing performance. His purchasing work also includes the design and implementation of purchasing councils, a key strategy for maximizing a multi-division corporation's leverage in a decentralized management structure. Formerly, Mr. Fagan managed the purchasing function for a billion dollar electronics distributor. He served as Senior Vice President-Product Logistics in a year-long special assignment. His responsibilities included purchasing, inventory, warehousing, and assembly. During his tenure, inventory was reduced by one-third, fill rates improved, and a contract for $100 million of components yielded significant cost savings. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. The focus of his research is on the role of regulation in the creation of competitive markets. He has written about the impact of deregulation in the railroad industry including a recent paper published by Transportation examining the impact of regulatory differences on rail freight share between the United States and the European Union. He has also examined the impact of electricity restructuring in the United States. The research in electricity markets has been published in the Electricity Journal and cited in the New York Times. Other research papers include the role of government in the financing of small and medium size enterprises to foster growth in China and the need for institutional innovation to support technology and globalization, a collaboration between Mr. Fagan and the Vice Minister for Science and Technology in China. In conjunction with his fellowship, Mr. Fagan has taught in the China Leaders in Development Executive Education Program and as a guest lecturer in several courses at Harvard's Kennedy School including Transportation Policy, Microfinance, and Operations Management. Mr. Fagan has a BA in economics from Bucknell University and a Masters degree in City and Regional Planning (MCRP) from Harvard University.