Supply Chain Performance
Customer profitability analysis
Sales and profit forecasting
Balanced Scorecard
Advertising performance and effectiveness
Supplier and partner collaboration
Sales force effectiveness
Customer profiling and segmentation
Market modelling
Supply Chain Performance: Do you have an end-to-end view of your supply chain value streams? Do you have appropriate performance measures across the chain? Are the improvement priorities clear to your people?
Thorogood can help you design a business intelligence solution that will support your people’s efforts to drive out waste in material and time.
In supply chain terms, information is necessary waste. Make sure that your information systems are providing what is necessary to the right people with the right perspectives, and that you are not wasting money on cumbersome, unfocused approaches.
The right system can help to align your people’s efforts and provide the framework within which they can build a common base of expertise. Too many solutions focus on symptoms rather than the fundamentals of performance. They support survival activities at the expense of performance improvement strategy.
The Thorogood approach is completely business value driven. We can deliver a solution that will support your strategic priorities for performance improvement.
Customer profitability analysis: Customer profitability analysis generates insights into how to maximize future company profitability. It is also an essential component of a Customer Relationship Management, or CRM system.
The need for separate customer profitability analysis typically arises as businesses become more complex, serving customers through a number of different channels, from a number of different buying points. It enables profitable customers to be nurtured and unprofitable customers to be managed back to profitability. When combined with product profitability analysis, and management of the product mix, the impact on bottom line profitability can be significant.
Profitability analysis requires the collection of sales and costs information from each part of the business to a level of detail that will identify reasons for profit variation. Action plans can then be developed, responsibilities assigned and progress monitored to help protect and grow the bottom line.
Often such applications will be part of a larger BI system. Data can be cross-related to a host of other information about customers to develop ever more sophisticated segmentation studies. The options are only restricted by our clients' needs and imaginations.
Sales and profit forecasting: Sales and profit forecasting is vital for any business and can be highly complex. Exclusive product lines, businesses in many different countries, global production factors and numerous local markets all add to the challenge. Accurate forecasts are essential for effective management of the supply chain. Accurate financial forecasts maintain investor confidence and help stabilize company capital costs. The CEO and CFO are important customers for such information; they must have confidence in the forecasts, and must be sure of the commitment of their subordinates to deliver. The better the system, the more effective the management of the entire concern at all levels.
Balanced Scorecard: Harvard Business School academics, Kaplan and Norton coined the term The Balanced Scorecard in 1992. A groundbreaking concept, it essentially described the process by which a company's strategy is broken down into key performance indicators (KPI's) for all the separate parts of its business. In Kaplan's own words: "The centerpiece of their management systems, innovating companies today are using their Balanced Scorecards to (1) gain consensus and clarity about their strategic objectives, (2) communicate strategic objectives to business units, departments, teams, and individuals, (3) align strategic planning, resource allocation and budgeting processes, and, (4) obtain feedback and learn about the effectiveness of their strategic plan and its implementation."
Operating units have targets for market share and financial performance, other KPI's will be leading indicators for future economic performance, and there may be KPI's for other staff functions such as Human Resources.
Producing KPI's requires the collection of data from multiple systems across a company's global operations, and regular, rapid and reliable calculation of actual performance. Simple and effective presentation of the KPI's is also key.
When properly implemented, a CEO can ensure that vision and priorities are being pursued by all parts of the business. A system based on the Balanced Scorecard can bring all of the managerial resources in a firm into complete alignment, pulling in one direction.
Advertising performance and effectiveness: Information on advertising effectiveness is valuable in negotiating rates for broadcast, online and print media. This is an analysis that identifies the most cost-effective investments in creative concepts and in media options for marketing departments. It uses data from selected markets that have been subject to different types of advertising strategy, and by comparing and contrasting performance, recommends optimal investment patterns. The return on investment is then monitored and clients modify their advertising spend accordingly.
The system requires the collation of information from both internal and external sources on the sales patterns, advertising spend, and results; in terms of coverage, frequency and OTS?. Mathematical models are used to assess the causality and the reliability of inferences drawn from the data.
Supplier and partner collaboration: One of the routes to greater efficiency and lower costs for businesses is the outsourcing of non-core activities to partners who can perform those activities more effectively and efficiently. Lower costs can arise from many sources; the application of specialised knowledge, the realisation of economies of scale and scope, and lower input costs. One of the key constraints on outsourcing is the transaction cost, essentially the incremental costs of information flows between the two participants. Extranet and web technologies can reduce the costs of such flows, and expand the number of activities that can be successfully outsourced.
The earliest beneficiaries of these technologies were firms that passed published materials between themselves; creative and media companies were able to reduce their transaction costs considerably by doing this in digital form. In the production environment, pack changes are now virtually all communicated, and managed, digitally. Within IT, outsourcing of support and development services is commonplace.
A greater range of internal processes such as HR, procurement and finance can all be outsourced successfully. This approach is simpler for smaller, fast growing firms who don't have established service departments.
We can help firms both collate the data and build the web interfaces that they need to outsource successfully. We are also significant suppliers of outsourced services in data management and system support.
Sales force effectiveness: Sales forces are labor intensive and the costs of such resources can increase quickly. The productivity of sales forces is therefore a subject for continuous attention within companies. Sales force effectiveness solutions include a range of related applications. These include collation of sales data by rep responsibility to monitor performance and analyze sales activity. These also include analyses that identify target customers and direct sales people to concentrate the efforts on priority targets.
Since sales people are field based, often analyses have to be provided to the representatives and their managers in the field. Sales management can then discuss performance with individual representatives, with a view to motivating and directing effort more effectively. Such information is most suitably made available off line. Sales people are not often selected for their analytical ability so the presentation of data must be simple and compelling. The provision of sophisticated analytical tools or expensive reporting to large numbers of field representatives is unlikely to be economically justified. Dissemination of the data also needs to be automatic.
We have extensive experience of sales force effectiveness solutions. These include components developed in-house which supplement the capabilities of existing reporting and analysis tools and can eliminate the necessity to provide large numbers of expensive tools to sales forces.
Customer profiling and segmentation: Effective segmentation and targeting of customers is essential to make marketing efforts productive. It enables companies that have modest resources to out-perform companies with much greater resources. It has a very high pay-back. We undertake the collection and modelling of customer data in collaboration with client managers, construct sensible hypotheses about customer groups and then test these against the data. The segments and target analyses are then refined and improved over time and the allocation of customers to target groups is done with rigour to maximise performance.
Market modelling: BI tools enable the performance of markets to be simulated over time. This is based upon current assumptions within the business about the factors that drive the market. Quantitative simulations can then be run, either to test that the current assumptions explain the past, or to test the impact of a potential change on the future. We can help assemble information on the performance of the market, and construct models that help to explain the trends. The point of this modelling is to reinforce and support the judgements of decision-makers, so the modelling is done in close collaboration with the managers who understand the market best.