May
4
Written by:
host
5/4/2010 6:37 PM
Q: What is so great about PBOPlus? What are we pitching?
A: The current Management thinking is top-down mostly. We help think, design and act:
- end backwards;
- horizontally cutting across functions (horizontal view of world);
- Zoomed in up to N levels, where N= 2,….,7
Q: Why End-Backwards?
A: Output of a business is consumed by the customer. To attract / hold the customer, we need to observe, analyse and understand a customer thinking, his way of evaluating choices and taking decisions. These external behaviours and circumstances are changing on an on-going basis at a very brisk pace due to customer learning.
Some of the factors are:
- profiles of people are rapidly changing and evolving;
- information is readily available, which in turn is influencing customer thinking;
- customer analysis before buying a product and their actual reasons for making a decision
Over a period, this results in a massive gap between offering of the company and the outside world.
If there is the disconnect here then what ever we do inside a company will not help to serve the customer. Hence, the need to think, talk and act end backwards, horizontally across the organisation.
The longer the alignment is not done with the customer the bigger the gap will be.
It becomes absolutely paramount for a business to make efforts to sense the changing customer expectations and make corrections across the entire value chain N level deep.
Q: Why Horizontal?
A: Because value is created through processes which run horizontally in a business. Typical well known processes are:
- Prospect to Order
- Order to Cash
- Procure to Pay
- Recruit to Retire
- Record to Report
- Strategy to Financial Performance
All the above processes have their centre of gravity around key stakeholders as indicated
| PROCESS |
KEY STAKEHOLDERS |
|
Prospect to Order
Order to Cash
Procure to Pay
Recruit to Retire
Record to Report
Strategy to Financial Performance
|
End Customer
End Customer
Supplier
All employees ( internal customers)
All stakeholders as well as employees
Shareholders
|
Q: Why N Level deep?
A: In order to completely align with the outside world, corrections, modifications, additions, deletions, alterations have to be made not just horizontally but zoomed in to N levels as well: 25,000 mts to 10,000 mts to 2,000 mts to 200 mts …
Q: Why this is necessary?
A: Most products are a commodity. Customer has plenty of choices. Yet the customer has to make a ‘choice of a supplier/vendor/retailer/service provider’. We therefore need to understand the factors which make a customer choose a product. Thereafter, we need to design processes (which cut across functions) in order to re-align with the customer expectations/needs/factors for making a choice. The key is to continuously catch up with the expectations curve and ensure alignment horizontally beginning from Macro to Micro level.