Management consultants generate fee income of about £60 million (#76 million) per annum in the Irish market which is growing strongly while Irish consultants generate foreign earnings of about £80 million a year, according to the Institute of Management Consultants in Ireland (IMCI). The big consultancy firms take the major share of the market, Mr Robert Grier of IMCI explained, but there are a growing number of smaller independent firms.

All of the big five accounting firms have management consultancy divisions and there is a number of smaller niche players as well as the Irish-based operations of international consultancies such as McKinsey & Co. The institute acts to protect the quality of the service by operating a code of professional conduct for its members, Mr Grier said.

Potential members are subjected to "a rigorous interview and must find a proposer and seconder" before they will be accepted as members, he said. In some ways the role of the management consultant has changed, he said. But he rejected any suggestion that consultants now needed other consultants to tell them how to develop their businesses.

He accepted that sometimes managers were afraid to take difficult decisions and used consultants to back up what they wanted to do. But more often, he said, consultants were used to bring an external perspective on a company's business, processes or performance and to focus full-time attention on the issues involved.

Companies nowadays are looking for "quicker, more instant solutions", he said. Consultants are given less time to analyse the situation. This could be partially due to the need to control costs, he suggested.

Consultants were less involved nowadays in areas of specialisation in manufacturing and more involved in business strategy, company development, corporate finance human resources, he said.

Consultants bring objectivity, broad experience, analytical skill and full-time attention to the job in hand, according to the IMCI guide to the industry. It advises companies to consider appointing a consultant where:

there is a known problem that the company does not have the time, the experience or the staff to tackle;

there is a known problem but the symptoms or the underlying cause cannot be determined internally in an unbiased way;

the company has tackled the problem but has not resolved it;

expertise is needed to introduce new technology, new products or processes or to restructure;

there is a conflict of views on future policy for organisation.

However, companies should take a number of steps before choosing a consultant, the IMCI advises.

These include defining the problem, deciding the job required and what is to be achieved, ascertaining how the company will benefit and deciding the timescale and scope of the job and what staff will be allocated to assist consultants. One management consultant who did not wish to be named said companies hire consultants "to help to sharpen up their operations".

In a competitive business environment "companies are looking for ways to do the job better and at less cost than their competitors, so they call in the consultant".

Demand for the service is very strong and is being boosted by the strength of the economy, he said. But he said advising on restructuring and cost cutting was not the main business of Irish consultants. "It is now much more systems integration, business process re-engineering and issues around e-commerce," he said. "The traditional consultancy market was straightforward, simple restructurings and getting independent advice on the best way to do it.

"But with the surge in information technology and business mergers it has moved on to re-engineering to make end process more effective and new ways to do business through e-commerce," he said.

The argument that companies just bring in consultants to back them up when they want to sack employees does not stand up, he maintained, suggesting that there has been a major shift in focus from cutting numbers to adding value to the core process.

The Irish market is highly competitive and local providers are wide open to competition from foreign consultants because "it's a people-based industry and people can travel".