Is This for Your Company?

Our clients are companies in a wide variety of product
and service industries.

We work with strategic business leaders (CEO's, GM’s, CMO’s, commercial directors, marketing and sales managers) who struggle to get the information they need to improve profitability.

Although our clients come from different industries, they all share the frustration of corporate information that consists mostly of internal raw data.   The problem is that raw data neither has strategic meaning nor provides the immediate strategic analysis and direction necessary for driving profitable growth.

 
Do You Face Any Of These Challenges?

Your company employs highly competent IT professionals and runs sophisticated enterprise software (ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence) to support the day-to-day operation. However, folks in strategic functions cannot easily and quickly find the information they need to grow market share, revenue and profit.
 
Your team cannot easily spot the 40% of your customers that drain your cash flow nor understand the reasons why. If your business is large enough to be statistically significant chances are the top 5% of your customers generate 50% of your profits while the bottom 40% of your customers is likely to generate no profit at all. You need to know at any time of the month, quarter or year exactly which customers fall in each category, and understand the reasons why, in order to drive the profitability distribution towards a higher, more balanced and stable bottom line.

A large portion of team meetings is spent arguing whose data is correct instead of focusing on the critical issues. The numbers generated by Finance do not agree with the analysis performed by Marketing or the explanations provided by Sales. You need a single version of the truth, but different folks run different queries, made different data cleansing assumptions and customized their Excel sheets based on different metrics.
 
Because your organization doesn’t have the information to safely discontinue products, your working capital continues to grow. A bloated product line requires higher inventory levels, clogs your manufacturing efficiency and fills up warehouse space. Everybody agrees they should reduce the number of SKU’s and brands. However, nobody wants to take the risk of irritating, or worse, losing a good customer over a product discontinuation. All the while your working capital is used up on products that don’t contribute.
 
Errors in your business data cause widespread inefficiencies misleading management into potentially expensive decisions. Many folks in your company recognize the transactional data has plenty of errors, at least at the customer, product line and market level, but they never get fixed. Marketing and Sales people think this is an IT problem and expect the data warehouse analysts to fix it, while IT thinks it’s a business problem and expects Sales or Marketing to take action. The result: the data seldom gets corrected, people give-up and running raw or bad data through your expensive systems becomes the norm.

You don’t know how to drive new product profitability since you cannot monitor product innovation metrics quickly and regularly. Your organization invests significantly in R&D, product design and engineering. However, it’s always difficult to measure the year-to-year profitability progress and vitality index of new products and understand if the product differentiation-to-commodity ratio is moving in the right direction. 
  

If you recognized yourself in any of the above scenarios, please continue to read.  You're in the right place.

Clients are likely to be successful working with us if…
 
If the following characteristics fit your company, or your vision for where you want to take your company, you are likely to benefit from our services:
 
Market Driven  -  Your organization has extensive knowledge of the markets, segments and sub-segments where you operate and their dynamics.  You collect and update competitive intelligence and understand that your commercial team’s unlimited access to this knowledge is crucial to ensure your continuous success. 
 
Customer Focused  -  Across your company, employees know your customers deeply and clearly understand how your products and services create value for them.
 
Committed to Innovation -  You strive to achieve value and differentiation in the products and services you offer.  You realize that being able to clearly measure the market and financial performance of new products is key to the profitable growth of your business.
 
Value Strategic Thinking  -  You understand the difference between raw data and strategic knowledge.  You realize that providing your entire team with instant access to strategic knowledge metrics and analytic tools beyond the industry standard constitutes a true competitive advantage.
 
Embrace Change.  -  You understand the need to change.  Business as usual, while comfortable, may not be the solution in the long term.  Your leadership style encourages and supports cultural change from the top down.  
 
Continuous Improvement Mindset. - Good enough isn't. You know that continued progress is all that keeps you ahead of the competition.

Willing to invest in those areas where the probability of return is high  -  While your current investment in information technology is designed to support your day-to-day operation efficiently, you know it is not adequate to provide the strategic direction necessary for the long term profitable growth of your business.  You understand that investing to accelerate profitable growth is a necessity.
 
If you fit the profile above, you will certainly benefit from the transformation of your corporate data into strategic knowledge. 

If you’ve found the information here helpful, you can learn more about what you can do to grow your business by scheduling a free, no obligation discussion at (262)681-2869 or by visiting our contact us page.

You can also learn more about how Strat-Wise works to help you get more bottom line impact from your Business Intelligence investment.  Or read some of our Case Studies.