Overview – Driving Customer Value
Business leaders, faced with the harsh economic realities of an increasingly competitive global marketplace, are constantly challenged to take decisive actions that will produce sustained and profitable customer value. However, given a plethora of data, diverse points of view and limited resources and time, determining which actions to take is rarely easy and often raises basic questions, such as “where should we begin” and “will we meet with success”.
At Hewat Strategic Edge we offer powerful facilitated resources and techniques, to support companies in their drive for sustained and profitable customer value. Our role is to make this task less daunting by focusing your attention on (3) three interrelated elements key to any company’s success.
- Set the strategic direction that will lead to your success
- Fix the processes that are critical to your success
- Align the skills, knowledge and commitment of your people to the strategic direction
The work of most companies today is technically complex in and of itself. The last thing you need is undo complexity in the planning aspects of your business. What’s required are simple but powerful tools to enhance your drive for success, be it companywide, divisional or at the departmental level. Hewat Strategic Edge’s facilitated resources and techniques centered around these three key elements and explained in greater detail below, will greatly enhance the effectiveness of your company’s drive for achieving sustained and profitable customer value.
Strategic Direction
This is a critical first step, in your drive for success, which enables everybody in your organization to be “singing from the same song sheet” and get people focused on results – the right results. Hewat Strategic Edge offers the following selected facilitated services to help you build a sound business foundation:
Strategic Framework
Our Strategic Framework combines the utility of a balanced scorecard approach, with the power of a vision as a touchstone for decision-making. It facilitates the articulation of outcomes and the identification of required improvements. In short, it demonstrates your leadership.
Our Strategic Framework process features four key components:
- Vision Statement (a brief description of the organization of the future)
- Pillars of Success (the foundation of your organization’s success)
- Multi-year Objectives (targets for each Pillar of Success)
- Ongoing Measures (indicators of achievement)
The creation of a dynamic Strategic Framework is facilitated over only a few days with benefits lasting for years.
Competitive Differentiation
“In the last few years we’ve cut operating costs, improved quality, increased customer satisfaction, bought some market share—and so has the competition. Now we are left with razor thin margins and unless we do something different they are going to get thinner.”
If this sounds like your situation, perhaps it’s time to step back, remove the clutter and engage your people in defining your business’s competitive differentiation. Knowing where you are at versus where you want to be is a vital step towards achieving your goal of sustained and profitable customer value.
We have developed a series of facilitated modules that enable a company to define its competitive differentiation, including:
- Mapping competitive elements
- Assessing the customer experience with products, service and delivery
- Determining your company’s unique focus and differentiation
- Develop subsequent action plans leading to sustained and profitable customer value
Processes
It is absolutely essential to have all of your business processes aligned to the organization’s strategic direction in order to deliver sustained and profitable customer value. Not all processes however are created equally. Given that resources are always limited, the focus must be on those priority processes that maximize the return by driving continuous improvement in critical areas such as increased revenue, cost reduction, enhanced cash flow, improved on-time delivery and higher quality levels. Selected facilitated services include:
Process Improvement Teams
Hewat Strategic Edge provides assistance in readily identifying those priority processes that will have the greatest potential return generated from performance improvement initiatives.
We provide leadership to help Process Improvement teams “get up and running” – expeditiously and in a results focused manner. Team members will be equipped with tools and a structured approach to complete a six step process improvement project. We provide on-going support to the team in order to ensure success.
Business Solutions Innovation Process
Non predictable crises, for which there are no obvious solutions, can occur at anytime and at anyplace throughout the organization – marketing, sales, operations, environmental/regulatory and human resources.
Hewat Strategic Edge leads a business solutions innovation process, to mitigate the potential damages arising from a crisis and potentially converts such a challenge into an opportunity. The process combines the rigor of sound business planning with the benefits of creative idea generation.
We facilitate a systematic sequence of actions which enables a team to:
- Understand the nature of a problem/opportunity
- Generate massive amounts of potential ideas
- Select the breakthrough ideas
- Work the ideas until there is a business solution
People
It is more than a truism that people are an organization’s greatest resource. A company’s ability to succeed in creating sustainable and profitable customer value is dependent on their people knowing, understanding and acting on the strategic direction. Their skills and knowledge must be integrated with the processes of the business.
Leaders must provide: effective communication in order to generate employee awareness; effective engagement to ensure employee comprehension; and provide demonstrated leadership to build trust.
At the end of the day, employees need to have confidence in the strategic direction and believe that the leadership is committed to it. Hewat Strategic Edge offers the following services to ensure your employees are effectively working towards achieving your stated strategic objectives:
Aligning & Mobilizing Employees
Tragically, too many potentially winning strategies, brilliant plans and cogent policies are ‘dead on arrival’, because of the failure to get employees to respond positively to new initiatives with the right focus; right actions and most importantly the right results.
Hewat Strategic Edge helps your leadership team enable their employees to understand their roles and responsibilities and to become better equipped to drive the successful implementation of strategies and plans. We are pleased to partner in the development of custom curricula to support clients undertaking major strategic change.
Team Development
Often the leadership will assign a key initiative that is vital to the success of the organization to a team of employees. A lack of pre-requisite skills to function as a high powered team can pose a significant risk of failure.
Hewat Strategic Edge facilitates your new project team’s development by helping them to clarify their team purpose and by providing the necessary team skills and processes that will enable their timely and effective accomplishment of the required goals.
