Looking to the future | Faculty Partnership CIC

That Light Bulb Moment – From Idea To Enterprise – Who Can Help You?

July 7, 2011 By Linda Eziquiel Leave a Comment

A few days ago, I spent a fantastic evening among inspiring presenters and an equally inspiring mix of small business owners. The venue was the University of Greenwich and the event Innovation and Sustainability – Key to Business Growth, a networking event organised under the FLASH Innovation program.

The event was packed full of information on how to get ideas off the ground including a presentation by Bryan Forbes from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) on Research and Development Grants and the new SBRI program that partners public sector organisations with businesses that can help them find a solution for a specific problem.

More on Research and Development (R&D) Grants
Research and Development (R&D) grants are available to assist micro, small and medium sized businesses and pre start-ups to deliver successful new products and achieve economic growth. The grants are UK wide and from 4th April 2011, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) has taken over the R&D grant schemes previously managed by the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), so the TSB supersedes the Regional Development Agency schemes. You can apply for funding for:

Proof of Market – such as market research and assessing the commercial viability of your idea;
Proof of Concept – initial feasibility studies and prototyping, testing or demonstrations and investigating productions options;
Development of Prototype – making pre production prototypes, getting Intellectual Property (IP) protected and for trials and testing including clinical trials plus identifying routes to market.

Applications are taken every two months so you can apply at any time and wait for the next round of applications to be considered. You will need some match funding with the grant funding being between 35% and 60% or in some circumstance 75% of the project costs, depending on the size of your company and which type of funding you are applying for.

Project timelines are also limited to 9 months, 18 months and 24 months respectively for funding types 1. to 3. as listed above.

More on SBRI Competitions
SBRI is a very different type of funding although still firmly focused on innovation. It is led by the needs of government departments – ie there is a public sector body (PSB), such as the Department of Health or the Ministry of Defence or the Ministry of the Environment that has a problem that needs solving. The problems could be anything e.g. the need for more efficient street lighting or a method of treating babies with asthma.

The aim is to facilitate government departments to engage with innovative companies, helping to accelerate technology commercialisation and provide a route to market, by matching the innovative company with a PSB from the outset.

The solutions sought are procured under EU procurement rules for Pre Commercial Procurement and development contracts are 100% R&D funded, against deliverables, with the IP staying with the company.

Solutions are sought through open competitions which are widely advertised by the TSB and on the SRBI website. Risks are mitigated through having a staged approach:

Phase 1 – proof of feasibility, 2 to 9 months, £20 – £100k
Phase 2 – Prototype development can be up to 2 years and £1M (depends on the challenge).

Look out for forthcoming competitions with Ministry of Defence, Health, Home Office, Cabinet Office and Foods Standards Agency requirements.

Just to get the picture straight FLASH Innovation forms part of the Institute for Sustainability’s FLASH program which is part funded by an ERDF grant and the above only covers the first presentation.

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Filed Under: Looking to the future, Thinking together

Why Business Analogies Matter – the Groupon example

June 9, 2011 By cicpartners Leave a Comment

It is June 2011, and Groupon is fast heading towards a $30 billion valuation in an initial public offering. That is a big number for a company with $645 million revenue and 83 million subscribers. How do we know this valuation makes sense? We probably don’t. There are a lot of metrics that financial analysts would use, but I’d like to point out one that my firm uses — identifying the relevant business analogy and understanding that in order to shed light on the implications for the company one is studying, in this case Groupon. This methodology is an externally focussed “best practices” approach.

The analogy

The immediate analogy that comes to mind is the quick-service restaurant business. Why? Because the operators of this type of business have basically the same value-creation strategy as Groupon. They keep adding outlets to support their high-growth model. The real issue starts to occur when they reach saturation. Groupon does somewhat the same thing but in a totally different industry. They are bringing deals to their subscriber base on behalf of clients where they have negotiated a deal-sharing arrangement, e.g., once-in-a-lifetime daily spa treatment for one-third the normal price. As they add sales reps (think restaurant outlets), they add new subscribers (think restaurant patrons), and they sell more deals (think meals) and grow revenues.

We know that listed restaurant chains can do phenomenally well until they hit the wall that we call market saturation. Starbucks is a good example of someone who hit saturation a couple of years ago, and the stock suffered. The chain has since gone back to basics, retreated from poor outlets, and rejuvenated the offer in order to get back on track, but there is a lesson to be drawn here by the Groupons of the world.

Implications for Groupon et al.

Groupon is adding staff, subscribers and deals, but basically it’s the same story as for the expanding quick-service chain. We as subscribers are starting to suffer deal fatigue. I know because I get a couple of daily feeds from cities to which I frequently travel. In my consulting world the key strategic challenge is helping key decisionmakers figure out the next step before it even occurs – looking forward to the eventuality and trying to make it work in your client’s favor.

In the quick-service restaurant world, operators respond by thinking about how to increase same-store sales (a year-on-year comparison of sales for outlets that have been open at least a year). This is a key metric of the overall vitality of a quick-service restaurant chain. Those who will invest long-term in Groupon need to identify what they same metric is and how Groupon or a similar company is responding to it. The initial look is pretty sobering. The New York Times did some nice analysis on Groupon metrics, as sourced from their S-1:

What can we do

The moral of the story is that for all the success of Groupon, they still need to be thinking one step further ahead in order to justify their proposed valuation. Each of us works in different industries, probably less dynamic than this, but there is the same opportunity to help identify new sources of value creation by better understanding business analogies. This is one of the things we do at Faculty Partnership. If you are interested in discussing further, please do get in touch.

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IOD reacts to Clegg’s parental leave proposals

February 20, 2011 By andrewwoodward Leave a Comment

The IOD’s February newsletter reacted negatively to Nick Clegg’s policy on giving more paternity leave to workers over a prolonged period of time. To paraphrase Miles Templeman, the IOD’s Director General, paternity leave was acceptable only if there was no impact on costs, shareholder dividends and it didn’t add extra administrative activity to the HR function. With these constraints my sense is that the IOD are saying ‘no’ to the policy without coming out directly, although the article was strongly worded enough.

My sense was that Mr Templeman is coming at the issue from an ideologically free market stance without accounting for the paradoxical nature in the IOD’s own policymaking. For example, there is a later article in the same newsletter bemoaning the difficulty of getting high calibre women into boardroom positions. The paradox here is that apart for gender inequality in the boardroom, there is often a forced choice between having a family or a career due the inflexibility of our current working practices. Our nations current ways of working hark back to the industrial revolution rather than an age of technological achievement and flexibility. Surely, if couples can choose which parent goes back to work and which takes leave there is an opportunity for women, who have there eye on high office, to continue their climb?

I’m unsure as to whether the IOD spends a great deal of time looking for best practice, but if the argument against paternity leave is around reduced shareholder dividends, company profits and thus productivity, Mr Templeman should look to the most productive countries for a model. Alas, for the IOD’s capitalist credentials those countries with the highest levels of social welfare and shortest working hours have the most productive workers. France and Switzerland are two European examples of highly productive workers enjoying the fruits of their labour by spending time with family. The USA (8th) and Great Britain (10th +) lag far behind the productivity ratings both of which follow a similar free market doctrine with long working hours and in the case of America limited social welfare support.
The reason behind such strong productivity ratings in countries such as France I can only reflect on. As a Dad myself, I took time to understand the dynamics of becoming a parent and working in the UK.

Firstly, post birth support for new mothers is very patchy. This is partly due to the dispersed nature of modern families. Grandparents now do not necessarily live in the same city or even region, so ‘popping next door’ in an emergency to get help is not an option. There are support groups such as the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) and various local authorities groups who attempt to fill the void left by absent families. These support networks are all aimed primarily at first time parents. Much less is available if it is your second child. The other options for support are employing a nanny or a childminder, unfortunately, this has an impact on the family both personally and financially.

We joined the NCT for our first child and noticed the Dads went back to work almost immediately. Bonding between baby and Father was quite difficult as most of the ‘breadwinner’ roles demanded long hours, especially in the South East where a long commute adds 2 hours plus onto a working day. Stress levels for both parents were high as sharing the childcare role was difficult when the child is more attached to one parent than the other.

We chose a different route. I took 6 weeks off work and have been working flexibly to balance my work with our childcare needs ever since. Whilst this arrangement obviously has financial implications, the rewards outweigh the financial sacrifice. We share the childcare equally, an activity that has brought unplanned rewards. Our son is happy, content and secure to be without his mother for a week at a time whilst she updates her skills and I work from home.

Modernising our current governmental policy around the relationship between work and families may well have the kind of beneficial effects that I have experienced. The short-term benefits have certainly not been financial, as I have paid for my own leave directly. The medium term will be different, as both of us will continue our businesses. For our children, (the next is due in 6 weeks) they will benefit from a happy and secure home environment.

My own view is that such a newsletter article worded in such a way has unpleasant overtones. I was left feeling that the way the senior managerial strata, represented by the IOD, think about their own position and the position of those they manage has not changed over the last 100 years. Would it not be deeply disappointing if all of the co-created change energy expelled over the last 20 + years was wasted, because senior management were just playing lip service to it?

Therefore, as a member of the IOD myself, I am in favour of Nick Clegg’s plans to make paternity leave available to all families. I would like to suggest that because of the benefits in the long term to our commercial productivity and thus prosperity, that the IOD should take the lead by commissioning research and developing best practice around how flexible leave for families can work for commercial business.

Andrew Woodward – Executive Director at Faculty Partnership CIC Ltd
February 2011

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Filed Under: Looking to the future, Policy and legislation Tagged With: Business research, Competitive discontinuity, Corporate policy, innovating to win, intelligent strategic think, Leadership, thinking outside the box, unconventional wisdom

Norton Rose Study: The Search for Growth (+ some market assessment nuggets)

November 11, 2010 By cicpartners Leave a Comment

The Communications, Media and Technology Practice of London-based law firm Norton Rose Group today released a study called The Search for Growth that provides a good “heads up” for market assessment and market entry strategy — areas that we work in and are interested in.

We attended this introduction to hear the gleaned insights from 4 Norton Rose partners as well as from 4 outside panelists — Scott Richardson-Brown, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations Director, CSR Plc; Ian Stoodley, Intel Capital EMEA, Patrick Ugeux, VP Corporate Development, Chellomedia (a Liberty Media company); and Jeppe Zink, Amadeus Capital Partners. The Search for Growth study was based on in-person interviews with key personnel at 40 global TMT firms with collective revenue in excess of £100 billion and very dispersed globally. Some highlights:

Sources of Growth
BIC not BRIC was a key takeaway. “The interviewees overwhelmingly felt that Russia would offer little opportunity for revenue growth over 2- and 5-year time periods.” Jeppe Zink did think that Russia was attractive for start-ups given the technologies emanating from there. As you would expect the rest of BRIC is viewed as a huge opportunity. Some other possible surprises were: 1) that Eastern Europe recovery was taking longer than expected; 2) as a converse to overall Russia lack of attractiveness but start-up favourable was China being very attractive in general but unfavourable for start-ups; and 3) the general view that Japan isn’t attractive, meaning these companies don’t see the recovery from Japanese malaise and it’s a difficult market to deal with.

Opportunities and Risks of New Markets
Keeping an eye on corruption and business ethics was another key takeaway. The Norton Rose team emphasized that the Bribery Act that will come into force in April 2011 “marks a new era in the international community’s commitment to eradicate corruption.” Its teeth are far sharper than FCPA. Patrick Uguex gave an example by highlighting some of the things that one needs to look out for in media. Piracy and the basic rule of law are obvious risks to factor in, but one they kept a close eye on was “underreporting of subscriptions”. If someone says that you will get 1 million subscriptions in a market. you need to assume that it will take 1.6 million gross subscriptions to achieve 1 million net, as a certain percentage of actual ones aren’t reported to the western owner.

The chart below shows the overall view of new market entry risk in TMT:

A good summary of the situation was made in reference to regulatory barriers: “Many countries, particularly in developing countries, have shiny ‘state of the art’ legislative documents, but what matters is how they are applied in reality.

Current Sentiment Regarding Market Entry Opportunities
Finally, as relates to what we do in helping clients assess these types of markets and opportunities, there was a panel discussion of whether opportunities are looking as good at the end of 2010 as they appeared to be earlier in the year. The short answer is no. One panelist said, “The recent negative sentiment is being driven by reduced demand coming from end consumers.”

While this study focused on the TMT sector, the rules and learnings seem applicable to most other sectors as well. They point out how we need to really assess markets to see what is attractive and what isn’t. Here we learn that Russia may not be for everyone. And we realise that we need to keep our eyes open to what market entry hurdles might be relevant to our particular product and/or service. Subscription reporting was the example cited here. What is it for your sector? This is the type of work that a small (but not too small) firm like Faculty Partnership is good at helping you with. Please contact us if you would like to discuss issues like this, or visit www.facultypartnership.com. Thanks to Norton Rose for sharing their insights.

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Filed Under: Intelligent strategic thinking, Looking to the future, Uncategorized Tagged With: BIC not BRIC, BRIC, Emerging Market Risk, Ian Stoodley, Jeppe Zink, Market Assessment, Market Entry Strategy, Norton Rose, Patrick Ugeux, Scott Richardson-Brown, Search for Growth

“Exercise Daily, Eat Healthily, Die Anyway”

October 28, 2010 By cicpartners Leave a Comment

My blog title is a Chinese proverb quoted by Amanda Waring (guest speakers) Actress, Writer and Film Director, in her address to the NHS Improving Dementia Care Conference on the new agenda of the UK coalition government, October 26th, 2010.

The context was to highlight that we are all going to die so let’s make sure that we plan for the later years in life so that those years are happier and more fulfilling, particularly for those people that have dementia and those people caring for them.

The conference was charged with emotion and so should it be. Dementia is a challenging and often frightening illness that will impact on most of us in our lives, either as someone that has dementia or as a carer for someone that has dementia. A sobering statistic quoted was the 75% of people in care homes are likely to have dementia.

So what is the new agenda and strategy?

The top line message that I took away is that “we are all in this together”. Well that sounds rather familiar doesn’t it? But was does it actually mean? In the context of dementia care it seemed to mean that we the citizens are going to have to battle for better services – nothing new here either then! But we were assured that we will not be alone in our battle because the government has made a commitment to prioritise health and social care budgets and older peoples’ health. However the services need to be cost effective so innovation and change is desperately needed, along side education on what dementia is and how to manage dementia care. That is education for everyone, but particularly all health professionals.

In the words of Paul Burstow MP, Minister of State for Care Service, “the first and last principle is dignity”. How will this be achieved? By protecting Health and Social Care budgets but also by spending money well. There is a need for innovation focusing on outcomes and a new outcomes framework is due to be published. There will also be money for research programmes.

The challenge for the professionals is to better join up health and social care services and local authorities are seen as having a major role to play on this. The new Health and Wellbeing Boards and local practitioners’ forums were cited as mechanisms for this.

The message that came through time and again was that a whole system approach is needed. Carers must be better involved, consulted and empowered. At the crux of the health agenda, and dementia is no different, is the policy aim that people are enabled to remain in their own homes for as long as possible and as long as they want to. This of course means that domiciliary care and supported housing are important parts of service provision.

Martin Green, Chief Executive of the English Community Care Association stressed the need for good quality care which he said is about strong leadership, good management and outcome focused training and development. The buzz word is ‘co-production’ to achieve a matrix of support that is ‘person centred’.

Concern was raised about the diagnostic gap. Only will the national strategy be successful if it is implemented on the ground, straddling public and private sectors, involving the voluntary sector, users and carers as champions at the local level.

How does GP commissioning fit into the picture?

Elizabeth Sargeant of the Hart Health Care GP Commissioning Consortium felt peer pressure could be critical and highlighted the need for GPs to be better linked into the community and for example to care homes. Unmet need and late diagnostics are driving up costs because people end up in acute care, when that could have been avoided which is clearly better for all. More sign posting of services and more pro-active case management is needed. GPs see those people that come through the door, but are they the people that really need to be seen? GPs were likened to ‘small corner shops’ when they need to be more like corporates.

One of the big issues for GPs is to reduce the use of inappropriate medicine such as anti-psychotic drugs. There is a one year target to reduce these by two thirds, by November 2011.

What is the conclusion in all this?

There is a lot of work to be done! The target is improved quality of care within a reformed system that has better evidence and gives people a voice and a choice. Citizens are going to have to drive the change (nothing new here then) but there is an opportunity to do so. The whole system must own the dementia issue.

It seems to me that in taking a patient centred, whole system approach, the first line of enquiry must be to look again at the context for delivering care. That is the context for the user, taking on board how people live their lives today which is radically different from even twenty years ago. We need to review the role that new channels of communication and technology can play, reconsider the dynamic between the patient and the healthcare professionals and empower people to take more control. This might be through supporting self assessment, diagnostic techniques.

And there is also a message somewhere is all this, about removing our heads from the sand and looking at how we do better as individuals, families and a society, in planning and preparing for our old age, before we become incapacitated and unable to plan for ourselves.

For more information on dementia and the UK National Strategy go to http://www.dementia.dh.gov.uk

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Filed Under: Looking to the future Tagged With: dementia, dementia care, health and social care, improving care, Improving Dementia Care Conference, NHS dementia

Lateral thinking – another iPad example

September 15, 2010 By cicpartners Leave a Comment

I once started a company making a remote doorlock for your home that worked like keyless entry for your car. In an early focus group, someone said, “It’s the type of product that I wonder today why I need it and in two years wonder how the heck I lived without it”. The company didn’t survive but I felt I’d done justice to the notion of thinking less conventionally, e.g., “thinking laterally”. Here’s another example from Apple iPad users of that concept in action. Bone’s, an Atlanta, Georgia steakhouse has its entire 1,350 label wine list on a iPad you receive when you enter. Sales are up 11% since this introduction. Read the story: Choosing Wines at the Touch of a Screen.

Also, check out how Faculty Partnership addresses these types of issues:

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Filed Under: Intelligent strategic thinking, Looking at 'now', Looking to the future Tagged With: Competitive discontinuity, Faculty Partnership, gaming industry, ipad, lateral thinking, strategic thinking, strategy, thinking outside the box

Challenging conventional budgeting wisdom – UK Policing

September 7, 2010 By cicpartners Leave a Comment

I recently delved into a report on UK policing to see what others are doing regarding identifying “Best Value”. This report comes HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) and can be found at HMIC Value for Money Inspections. A summary of the report is as follows: “HMIC’s report, ‘Valuing the Police’ shows that only 11% of the police are visibly available to the public, despite year-on-year increases to budgets for the last 40 years. HMIC warns that with looming budget cuts, the availability of the police to the public will be even further reduced, unless there is a total redesign of the police.”

Thus conventional wisdom says a cut equals a reduction in front-line service (the 11% referred to above). With the incredible baseline of data that is available in this report (a mere 2,600 pages) I’m guessing there is a way to redesign the work such that the 89% is readjusted rather than the 11%. Hats off to someone for doing the groundwork that let’s someone challenge conventional wisdom if they choose to do so.

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Filed Under: Intelligent strategic thinking, Linking organisations together, Looking at 'now', Looking to the future, Practical effective implementation, Securing the benefits, Thinking together Tagged With: Benchmarking, Best value for local government, Comprehensive Spending Review, cpst reduction, CSR, Faculty Partnership, front-line services, Musings, strategic thinking, strategy, UK Police, unconventional wisdom

Musings from a private sector guy doing public sector work (tax policy)

September 7, 2010 By cicpartners Leave a Comment

I do a fair amount of work now in both the Private Sector and the Public Sector. The mantra of private sector work is to fix things that need changing. With the Public Sector, it is sometimes difficult to figure out what needs fixing. Everyone has an opinion – more of this, less of that. Politics is always front and center, but this is at the expense of our economic health. Deep in our gut we all know that tax policy needs fixing.

What we might consider is stepping back and starting over. Ross Douhat in the New York Times said that “The problem is not that we tax high-rollers too lightly, it’s that we subsidize their irresponsibility”. How true this is. We have a system where we use tax policy to encourage behavior but this has side effects. A few examples:

- Deductibility of mortgage interest in the US encourages people to buy more house than they can our should

- Farm subsidies – why are grain crops heavily subsidized and beef isn’t

- Tax preference for debt versus equity based on tax deductibility of loan interest

- Investment tax credits, once started, never go away and encourage continued development of what eventually become sunset industries

I could go on, but my point is that a truly efficient market can help us make these allocations. The best example of this is with income and tax. Currently the most highly taxed income is salaries and wages. Why is that work more highly taxed than that which comes from dividends and interest or capital gains?

Having the same tax regime for all types of income and expense will encourage earners, savings, investors, and manufacturers and so forth to make decisions based on the merits of the case. This can be a progressive system, e.g., the progressive flat tax (say 10%, 25% and 35%), but it will be one that is based on good economics rather than good tax strategy.

It would certainly be interesting if debt didn’t have such an attraction from tax deductibility that it encourages folks to leverage themselves to their maximum and often beyond.

There are probably many flaws in this logic, but we do need to remind ourselves that the current system doesn’t work and if something doesn’t work, we owe it to try something new. Do we really have the courage to let the markets work to the greater benefit of us all?

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Filed Under: Intelligent strategic thinking, Looking to the future, Securing the benefits Tagged With: Competitive discontinuity, Faculty Partnership, Musings, progressive, strategy, taxes, thinking outside the box

Putting the share back into Shared Services

September 7, 2010 By cicpartners Leave a Comment

Synopsis

There are multiple methods for assessing the current position of one’s business entity. We have written separately on FAST Benchmarking, the external perspective on current position. In this case study, we review the internal perspective through the eyes of our work with a luxury goods manufacturer and retailer.

Despite the fact that our client was already quite streamlined, the systematic approach we took to understanding cost drivers and identifying solutions led to an 8.8% cost improvement on a £3.4m cost base over the 10-week duration of the project. The client’s conclusion was that “lean and mean” can become “leaner and meaner” but it took an outside pair of eyes to know where to go to get there.

Background

Competition today may be tougher than it has ever been – it may be the economy, deflationary expectations, desperate competitors, market leaders. Each can put extraordinary pressure on a company’s cost base. In today’s climate, they all are.

As business managers we know it should be a last resort to reduce growth-oriented investment – those things that generate revenues and pay the bills. Advertising and marketing, calling on our clients or customers, investing in our product are all the lifeblood of achieving top-line growth. For complex organizations (those spread over multiple sites and possibly multiple countries), tackling the cost base is the more immediate path to take. In this piece, we speak about “shared services costs” and whether we are really maximizing the sharing opportunity in these areas?

We worked with an international luxury goods company that had multiple locations in a single country – the focus of our shared-service cost review. Margins and growth were both healthy and the CEO and CFO always ran the company like a small business. By all definitions this company was already lean and mean. Thus, it is an interesting study to see how big the benefit can be by sharing services in the following areas we studied – temporary labour, delivery services, cleaning, utilities, telephones, stationery and maintenance.

Does “lean and mean” equate to absolute lowest cost? The answer was no in this example, as we found and implemented savings of almost 10% – a total of over £300,000 – over the 10-week duration of this work.

Chart 1 shows what the status quo looked like at the beginning of this project. This was a case of the extreme of “thinking global and acting local”. These six subsidiaries all do roughly the same thing – retail and wholesale luxury goods around the globe, but when it came to working together on a local level, they didn’t.

Chart 1

Shared Services suppliers and spend by subsidiary

Step 1 was to assess where they were at that moment in time. Our hypotheses were as follows:

- Some subsidiaries followed best practices that could be emulated by others

- Sometimes suppliers gave preferential treatment based on greater volume or activity and possibly 2+2 could equal 5

- There were probably some “nice to have” activities thrown in with “must haves” and management should revisit which ones they really need

Here we share three examples from the work and how they relate to these hypotheses. The three examples are electric usage (Chart 2), overnight delivery (Chart 3) and cleaning services (Chart 4). The electric example is a clear case of rate differentials that had little to do with volume. Also we were able to achieve further rate reductions based on combined volume. The savings achieved in this area was 19.8% of current spend.

Chart 2

Chart 3 on overnight delivery costs (e.g., FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc.) is another example of the insights from a relatively simple analysis. There were three suppliers with quite different cost structures. Volume played a factor in these relationships but wasn’t the only factor, and we were able to shed 5% from total annual invoices of almost £750,000.

Chart 3

Our final example, cleaning services, was slightly more nuanced. In this situation, “quality” was a cost driver. Corporate headquarters or a retail location had a higher cleaning standard than a regional sales office. Knowing this, we normalized for this required quality difference and calculated what a normal cost line might be. As with almost all other areas of shared services cost, there is quite a lot of unnecessary variation around the norm, and a common contract would help save 21.2% of this cost. Chart 4 shows how the situation looked and how it might improve.

Chart 4

All told as shown in Chart 5 savings added up to 8.8% of over £3.4m of expense. The satisfying part of the work was that our “lean and mean” client was amazed at the opportunities that surfaced that went behind what they were able to find on their own.

Chart 5

Summary of savings by shared-service cost area

Conclusion

As this client did, it pays to never assume you are optimized. A relatively small investment in seeing where you stand may realize savings that you hadn’t thought of or unearthed before. In this case it was worth over £300,000, not a bad return on 10 weeks work.

This shared services analytic approach is an internal methodology for addressing the issue of improving things now. It is a nice complement to our external approach – FAST Benchmarking, which takes an outward looking approach to finding out where you stand in the world.

About the author

Ted Leavitt has an eclectic background that in general management, marketing, strategy, entrepreneurial, and M&A spanning large corporations and management consulting to his own start-up company. The common theme is taking these enterprises in new directions via top-line or bottom-line changes whether in the Private or Public Sectors.

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Filed Under: Linking organisations together, Looking at 'now', Looking to the future, Practical effective implementation, Securing the benefits, Thinking together Tagged With: International Synergies, Shared Services

That Light Bulb Moment – From Idea To Enterprise – Who Can Help You?

Why Business Analogies Matter – the Groupon example

IOD reacts to Clegg’s parental leave proposals

Norton Rose Study: The Search for Growth (+ some market assessment nuggets)

Lateral thinking – another iPad example

Challenging conventional budgeting wisdom – UK Policing

Musings from a private sector guy doing public sector work (tax policy)

Putting the share back into Shared Services

Shared Services suppliers and spend by subsidiary

Summary of savings by shared-service cost area

Conclusion

About the author

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