Services and Programs

Strat-Wise offers a variety of programs designed to provide your company with the Strategic Knowledge System™ you need to grow your businesses profitably.  

 

1. Strategic Analysis Toolbox™. - Our analytic tools are custom designed to represent your business model and reflect the competitive landscape you face.  This integrated information tool provides your company with a competitive advantage by ensuring a 360° view of the market-business-profit reality—the critical information needed to make the right decisions fast, time and time again. 
2. Training. - We provide the training necessary to maximize the effectiveness of your Strategic Analysis Toolbox^TM and ensure they are continuously used by your organization, in order to increase profitability by:

•  Increasing Sales Throughput
•  Reducing Inventory and other Working Capital Investments
•  Decreasing Operating Expenses

3.  Analysis and Maintenance. - Even though we provide training for your group to perform their own business analysis and market intelligence updates, we can manage the process for clients that prefer outsourcing this task.

 
 1.  Strategic Analysis Tools

The following tool set provides a clear strategic diagnostic overview of your business, market and profitability.

1.1)      Interactive Sales & Profitability Tracker – You can evaluate and compare progress on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis.  It fully integrates your actual business results with strategic market intelligence dimensions like business unit, customer location and market segmentation.
Sales marketing and senior management will benefit from the business analysis capability  with no intervention of financial analysts or IT support.  They can instantly diagnose the causes for lagging business results and find accurate answers to complex questions such as: 

• Where are we more profitable: strategic customers, key customers or distributors?
• Why? Is it due to pricing, volume or product mix?
• What is our current market share in a particular business unit in Europe?
• Are our specialty brands more profitable than the commodity ones? Why?
• Are our new products more profitable than the old ones? How much? Why?
• Who are the top 5% of my customers that generate 50% of profits? Why?
• Who are the customers and what are the products that drain our profits? Why?
• How much is our profit by customer growing versus last year?  And versus budget?  

  1.2) Dealer, Distributor, Agent Tracker - you can compare progress of how your distribution partners sell to their customers and monitor their profitability on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis.  It fully integrates their actual business results with your strategic market intelligence dimensions like business unit customer and market segmentation.
Sales marketing and senior management will benefit from the fast business analysis capability by finding out the causes for your partners’ business results instantly with no intervention of financial analysts or IT support.  They will be able to find accurate answers in seconds to complex questions like the following: 

• What are our most profitable channels?
• Who do our distributors, agents and dealers sell to?
• In what markets / segments / sub segments?
• What is their mark-up? / Profitability?
• What is their new versus old product ratio?
• Who are their most profitable customers?  

1.3) Business Plan Viewer - Your team can view the details of your business plan by understanding how much of each product is expected to be sold to each customer in each market during the future plan year.  This is extremely useful to eliminate surprises.  This provides sales and marketing teams plain with a clear picture of the expectations and full accountability for results.  They will be able to find accurate answers in seconds to complex questions like the following:

• How much of each product is Sales-rep X supposed to sell to each of his customers in June of next year?
• What is the profit margin by customer expected to be?
• What Revenue and Profit do we expect to generate next year in a particular market segment in France?  

1.4) Competitive Opportunity Tracker - Your marketing and sales teams can constantly update and monitor your own and competitors’ market share.  They can also evaluate your company’s growth opportunities as well as the pieces of business that are at risk due to competitive threats.  Using either your own CRM and ERP data or other data feeds, this tool provides your team a complete interactive overview of the markets in which you operate and allows you to clearly visualize the pieces of business your competitors enjoy at each one of your customers.  They will be able to find accurate answers in seconds to complex questions like the following:

• What does our opportunity pipeline look like?
• Which pieces of business are under competitive threat? (By product, competitor and customer location, in units and dollars)
• What is each of our competitors’ current market share?
• What is our share of the business at customer B?   

1.5) Interactive Market Study Viewer - Have you ever performed market research or purchased a multi-client market study that has thousands of pages and tables that are not precisely formatted in the way you need for your business.  We can integrate them into an easy to use, interactive market intelligence tool to allow your team to explore the market data fast and make comparisons with your own sales and profitability data in the exact way you need it. 

2. Training Programs

2.1) Strategic Analysis Toolbox™. Although our tools are designed to be intuitive and extremely user friendly, we provide the necessary training in order to fully exploit their potential in your business. Attendees will learn how to perform strategic analysis and find the root causes for performance, instantly and interactively. This is a six hour hands-on training session, three hours in the morning, lunch break and three hours in the afternoon. This computer classroom style session is designed to find the answers to complex questions specifically related to your business. It includes practical exercises to perform diagnostics of your business.

2.2) 80/20 Analysis and Strategy. At first glance, you might assume that 50% of your profits come from 50% of your customers. This couldn’t be any further from reality. Over a century ago Vilfredo Pareto discovered that 80% of the reward was produced by 20% of the effort. While the 80/20 rule is widely known, companies seldom understand how to exploit it to gain productivity and increase profitability. By applying it, we can immediately identify those products, customers, sales-reps, markets, segments, businesses or regions that drain cash, visualize the reasons for poor performance and take corrective actions. More importantly, we can also find segments that are extraordinarily profitable, understand the reasons behind profitability and design new products, services or training programs to replicate their profitability.

The implementation of 80/20 Analysis and Strategy improves profitability. It brings a clear picture of how the 80/20 principle impacts profits, R&D success rates, customers, products, distributors and inventory levels. In addition, 80/20 is used effectively to perform product and customer portfolio management, SKU rationalization and inventory reduction on an ongoing basis.

Through our 80/20 training program we will show your team how to exploit the Strategic Analysis Toolbox^TM to impact the bottom line. This program covers how to use the 80/20 Principle to find out which products or customers drain your company’s cash and how to stop the bleeding through product and customer portfolio management. Additionally, it covers how to determine which products, customers, regions, distributors, sales representatives, projects and markets are really strategic for your company, uncover why they are profitable and what to do to replicate their profitability.
We provide 80/20 Analysis training to optimize profitability in the following areas:

2.2.1) Eliminating Underperforming Products – Your team will very quickly identify the unprofitable products and have all the elements to develop an individual action plan for each of the low profit SKUs, taking into consideration each particular customer risk. The objective is to simplify and reduce the size of the product line with no loss of revenue. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.2) Optimizing Customer Portfolio – Your sales and marketing folks will be able to understand profitability by customer group and account location, define customer segmentation and develop an action plan to increase profitability of customers and account locations that are not satisfactory. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.3) Optimizing Agent, Distributor and Dealer – Your Sales and Marketing teams will be able to evaluate profitability by distribution partner, understand underlining reasons for performance and develop an action plan to increase the profit of those partners that are not delivering. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.4) Increasing New Product Effectiveness – Are your new products delivering the expected results? Your team will visualize the profitability of new products versus old ones and identify the stars and dogs. Understanding the reasons for performance will help you R&D and Engineering teams developing the next generation of products. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.5) Optimizing Sales Force Profitability – Who are the top 5% of your sales force that deliver 50% of your total profit? Why are the top 5% 100 times more profitable than the rest of the team? Finding this out would be useful to develop training programs to bring everyone’s sales throughput up to speed. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.6) Business and Market Segment Profitability Metrics – Your team will be able to find and compare the profitability of each market segment and sub-segment in which you operate in seconds, not days or weeks. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.7) 80/20 Inventory Matrix/ Inventory Reduction/ Inventory-Dollar-Days TOC Metrics – Identify the star and dog SKU’S in your inventory instantly. Create a matrix that will help your team set effective inventory reduction strategies while maintaining targeted customer service levels. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.8) Critical Raw Material Profitability – Find a Quick way to maximize the profitability of scarce or critical raw materials. Visualize the products and customers that yield maximum amount of sales throughput per unit of constrained resource. This is normally a four hour computer class style training session.

2.2.9) Theory of Constraints Metrics – This is an effective way to align personnel performance targets with department goals and company profitability objectives. This is normally a two hour training session.

3. Analysis and Maintenance

Even though we provide training for your teams to perform their own business analysis and market intelligence updates, we can manage the process for clients that prefer outsourcing this task.

Where do you go from here?

If you have read this far, you might be wondering whether this program could work for your company or not. One way to help answering that question is our complimentary Strategic Analytics Session.

During the session we’ll explore the challenges you and your team face, the kind of results you’d like to see, and whether this program will be of help or not. Even if the program isn’t a fit, you and your team will leave the conversation with more clarity about your issues and excited about what’s possible for the future.

If this introductory session is something you could see your team doing, the process starts with a brief, no-obligation call to get acquainted, discuss your situation, and determine who needs to be involved. And rest assured. We’ll never push you to make a decision or pressure you in any way - that’s simply not how we work.

The initial conversation will take about one hour and can be done ideally in person, or by phone. Click here to arrange a time to have a strategy session and I will be in contact with you within the next 24 hours.

Looking forward to seeing how we can help.


Warmest Regards

Bill Cabiro

Managing Director
Strat-Wise Consulting