World-class organizations constantly challenge their business models to maintain a competitive advantage and deliver incremental value to their customers and stakeholders.
Our Business Analysis
& Value Targeting Approach
Centric Consulting has developed a full suite of business diagnostic and analytical techniques to assist organizations in identifying, validating, and prioritizing value creation opportunities. We have worked with small and middle-market organizations, as well as within divisions of large Fortune 100 companies, to assist with business analytics and value targeting efforts. Our experienced management consultants bring a strong mix of industry, strategy, operations and financial experience to assist our clients.
Our capabilities in this area include:
- Market Analysis and Competitive Benchmarking
- Voice of Customer Analysis
- Cost Structure and Value Driver Analysis
- Internal Business and Operational Assessments (Processes, Organization, Technology)
Identifying Value-Creation Opportunities to Serve You Better
Achieving and maintaining a competitive advantage requires an organization to continually assess its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Strategic Opportunities and Threats
- Evolving customer and business partner needs – increasing customer sophistication, focus on cost competitiveness
- Opportunities to expand business
- Increasing regulatory requirements
- Competitive threats from higher quality, lower cost providers
- Offshoring opportunities
Operational Challenges
- Customer service issues – speed, responsiveness, flexibility, and quality
- Degrading cost-effectiveness – as compared to competitive service providers
- Lack of focus on core processes
- Functional silos – lack of end-to-end process integration
- Process inefficiencies – the proliferation of redundant, non-value added activities
- Misalignment of roles and responsibilities based on skill levels
- Building a performance-based/continuous improvement culture
Market Analysis and Competitive Positioning
Understanding external business drivers and market/competitive positioning is critical to stay ahead of the competition. Regulatory, industry, competitive and technology changes can create opportunities or threats to an organization. We leverage industry and market research data, along with specialized data collection techniques, to help identify and categorize key business drivers and trends in these changing areas. We then work with our clients to analyze and characterize drivers in terms of near-term vs. long-term, positive vs. negative impact and degree of impact. Finally, we help assess implications to the organization and prioritize the importance of each business driver.
Voice of Customer Analysis
Gathering voice of customer information is crucial to understanding customer perspectives on current performance and future customer needs / desires. Staying close to customers and implementing a process to continually capture and analyze customer information is a key part of this process. We work with our clients to gather and analyze customer data in a structured and objective manner. This can be done through a variety of techniques including mining existing data, customer surveys and detailed customer interviews / focus groups. We then help organizations distill key findings and incorporate them into other assessment and strategic planning activities.
Want to learn more about our Business Analysis and Value Targeting capabilities?
Cost Structure and Value Driver Analysis
Organizations typically have a wealth of financial and operational data to draw upon to analyze performance. This data is typically made available via various business intelligence and data warehouse solutions. The challenge is how to structure and analyze the data to identify key performance issues and value drivers. We identify and prioritize value drivers through value tree analysis, value stream mapping and product/customer channel analysis. Sensitivity analysis is applied to model and determine which drivers offer the “biggest bang for the buck.” The findings are overlaid with internal and external assessment findings to validate opportunity areas.
Internal Business & Operational Assessments
(Processes, Organization, Technology)
A company’s processes, organization structure, personnel, and technology solutions collectively define how work gets accomplished and value is delivered. World-class organizations are constantly reviewing current performance and effectiveness of core operational areas to identify issues and improve performance.
We developed a comprehensive methodology and approach for assessing performance and maturity levels of operational areas including sales and marketing, operations, customer service and shared services. We take both a quantitative and qualitative approach to our assessment work. This includes performance baselining and benchmarking, process analysis, management interviews and working sessions in order to gain a better perspective of performance and identify true root cause issues. We then bring all these findings together into an assessment summary that articulates key issues, opportunities, and recommendations by operational area.