Business During Economic Upturn

As we all know, it was a difficult time that the economy underwent in most of the countries in the world, barring few, though. In the current post-recession period, an organization needs to be ready to grab the opportunities arising out of the upturn. Growing revenues & profitability may therefore be the common objectives of most of the organizations. The challenge is to assess the current contextual landscape and envision the emerging / future trends before we initiate the growth strategy formulation process. While we design the financial value levers to give you the Growth of Top & Bottom lines, Working Capital & RoC, we should also think of some of the non-financial aspects of your organization to gradually develop a Balanced Score Card (BSC). This may call for making some changes in how we do business and may lead to Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) / Business Process Management (BPM). Re-visiting the business process and making a paradigm shift direct towards change management across the organization or the impacted functions.

Over & above, Vision-Mission-Value Credo, one of the starting points of BPR or BPM could be Voice of Customer (VoC) to become more customer-centric or to improve market participation further through better customer satisfaction / delight / loyalty. Market Research organizations help us to get our existing & prospective customers surveyed to start re-analyzing our SWOT to possibly redefine the go-to-market path &/or market attack plan. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps us with appropriate Contacts & Accounts, which serve as the basic inputs to any customer survey. Clear action items come out to move forward with multiple & simultaneous improvement programs.

For many organizations Product/s is/are the core to the business. New Product Development Process (NPDP) is therefore very important & pivotal to such organizations. One of the starting points of NPDP is VoC, which other inputs comprises of Break-Through Idea (BTI). For new-to-earth (NTE) products possibly VoC will have much lower weightage than BTI. The outcome of the NPDP needs to be High Value-Added Solution (HVAS) to solve customers' problem better than our peers (http://sami-kar.blogspot.com/2012/05/3-major-steps-in-solution-business.html). Value creation and time-to-market are the keys to NPDP to aptly position the product in the market place to gradually become peerless.

Once all these are done well, customer acquisition becomes the focus, as we know. Account & Business Development are the couple of areas where the organization may need to focus, after the valued decision is taken as to which vertical or which top X verticals to address, to start with. Business & Market Intelligence helps us to sharpen our focus areas to have faster return. There are some good business Intelligence tools available in the market which helps the senior & top management to take appropriate & faster decision making.

Price, for a non-commoditized product, has nothing to do with the product cost in a market-driven environment or for a HVAS, if it’s not a NTE. Price is a function of value that we deliver to solve customers' problems. A bottle of water may cost as high as US$ 10 or more in the middle of a desert for an utterly thirsty guy under the scorching sun. Pricing tools are available which can be a part of the pricing process to dice & slice data for desired analysis & decision-making.

To achieve all these, as we all know, we need a good, committed & talented team, which is a product of good Human Resource (HR) Management process & enabling organizational environment. HR Tools, Training organizations and the likes are available in the world to help us achieving what we like to do. The organizational environment needs to be encouraging, empowering & respectful to allow individuals & teams to excel in everything that they do. 

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You can also visit the blog post on Business Intelligence: http://consult2win.blogspot.com/