Case Studies & Best Practices
Stanley Black & Decker Case Study: Adapting, Forecasting, and Reporting Capabilities in Today’s Environment to Drive a Sustainable Culture of Performance
Kenneth Kordana, Manager, Internal Reporting & Steven Brodrick, Director, Corporate FP&A, Stanley Black & Decker
Stanley Black & Decker is an $8B global and diversified manufacturer of a wide array of products along multiple segments. In an ever changing environment, tracking of accurate reporting and forecasting is critical to ensuring continual optimization of capital and resources toward company strategies and objectives. In order to meet these challenges Stanley Black & Decker developed a strategy to focus forecasting efforts on measures that drive decision-making at the business unit level, as well as alignment with the corporate level. Specifically the case study will cover the following topics: 1) gathering the proper data; 2) setting realistic objectives; 3) measuring accuracy; and 4) facilitating standardization in reporting and communication to drive the successful realization of budgets, forecasts, and decision-making.
Key Issues
• Establishing measures that are key to decision-making at the various management levels
• Aligning performance measures with the planning process and instilling a culture of accuracy and fast reaction to market conditions
• Reporting and analysis—efficiently leverage systems to unlock details for strategic review
DTCC Case Study: Matching Measures to Strategy in Financial Services
Jason Gerros, Director of Business Reengineering and Quality, The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC)
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) provides clearance, settlement, and information services for equities, corporate and municipal bonds, government and mortgage-backed securities, money market instruments, and over-the-counter derivatives. In 2008, DTCC settled more than $1.88 quadrillion in securities transactions across multiple asset classes. A tightly integrated strategy and operational management system with KPIs clearly linked to their organizational strategy is one reason why DTCC maintains a AAA credit rating. They adopted the Balanced Scorecard to monitor new sources of revenue, product development, and customer acquisition, while continuously optimizing costs. In 2008, during the market meltdown, DTCC completed the largest close-out in history—Lehman Brothers’ $500 billion portfolio liquidation—without any loss to DTCC customers or taxpayers.
Key Issues
• Evolution of the Balanced Scorecards at DTCC
• Linking operations to strategic direction using a Balanced Scorecard approach
• Identifying the right measures to ensure management accountability
Army Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) Case Study: Organizational Transformation: Linking Strategy and Operations
Rhonda Bradford, Chief Business Transformation & Mark Neely, Business Transformation Manager, AAFES
AAFES is a $10 Billion retailer serving military service members consisting of 43,000 employees, and over 12 million customers at more than 3,000 stores in some 30 countries. Operating retail facilities worldwide from Thule, Greenland to Afghanistan generates unique retail supply chain challenges. To effectively serve the best customers in the world and remain competitive in the tough retail industry, AAFES underwent a strategic transformation by implementing the Balanced Scorecard strategy management framework and a corresponding Enterprise Performance Management solution to help improve the strategy execution process by creating linkages between strategy and operations, and driving accountability throughout the entire organization. To date, these initiatives have led to outstanding Execution Premium results including reduced inventories, increased customer traffic, a rise in employee satisfaction and a 10% revenue growth. Learn about the challenges AAFES faced during this transformative process and the best practices it adopted to achieve breakthrough performance.
Key Issues
• Key metrics to focus on process improvements
• Aligning unit and employee goals to strategy
• Creating a strategy review process for critical decision-making
Millipore Case Study: Strategic Skills: Implementing and Leveraging a Competency-Based Talent Management System
Christophe Couturier,Vice President, Finance & Toni Spinazzola, Vice President, HR Millipore Strategic Skills Initiative
Over the past five years, Millipore, consisting of 6,000 employees and operating across over 30 countries, developed and implemented a strategy management system based on the Balanced Scorecard. This system inspired Millipore to define a set of strategic initiatives to improve business operations. Among these initiatives, Millipore has been implementing a Strategic Skills Initiative—a competency-based system designed to identify and assess strategic competencies, highlight critical talent gaps and develop programs to improve functional and individual performance. This system includes strategic competencies and different ratings for each competency, creating unique "talent possibilities." In essence, the system takes the "talent dimension" of the Strategy Map and builds a full management framework around it. This session will address how the Strategic Skills Initiative has been implemented, how it is leveraged to assess current talent and define future targets, and how it aligns the organization to Millipore’s strategic objectives.
Key Issues
• How the Strategic Skills Initiative drives alignment of talent to strategy
• Key components of the competency model that supports the initiative
• How to transform talent management into a structured process
Alex Lee, Inc. Case Study: Sibling Survivalry: Using Scorecards to Drive Performance at Sister Companies
Robert Vipperman, Vice President, Human Resources, Alex Lee, Inc.
Alex Lee, Inc., is a large, multifaceted food-retail and distribution holding company headquartered in North Carolina. Two of Alex Lee's operating companies—Merchants Distributors, Inc. (MDI - wholesale grocery distributor) and Lowe's Food Stores (grocery retailer)—share an interesting relationship: they are sister-companies within Alex Lee, but have a wholesaler-retailer relationship, as Lowe's Food Stores is a customer of MDI. Both companies are using the Balanced Scorecard to improve strategy execution and have aligned their scorecards to the overall corporate strategy at Alex Lee. But they have also aligned their scorecards to each other—in order to better manage the wholesale/retail relationship. This "cross-alignment" is accomplished both by sharing initiatives between the two companies as well as including measures on one company's scorecard that are directly impacted by the other company's performance.
Key Issues
• Explain the relationship between the two sister companies
• Describe the process used to identify "cross-company" measures and initiatives
• Provide examples that other organizations, with similar wholesale/retail structures, can consider using
Telecom Case Study: Outcome Based Analytics in Action
Mark Teflian,Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Aha!
Telecommunications companies operate in a highly competitive market to provide telecommunications solutions to small, medium and large business and enterprise customers. Last year as the economy worsened, it was evident that heightened focus on customer and revenue retention was the key to operating success at a major telecommunications company. The telecommunications organization estimated that by improving its retention rates by a small amount (tenths of a percent); it could yield a dramatic improvement in operating performance. Centering its business performance on customer experience and retention, the company chose to put operational analytics to work by embedding customer-focused KPI based models into the fabric of its business processes. They also transformed their customer experience reporting method from a stand-alone and static reporting base, into actionable analytics to align customer strategy and execution with retention across the company. They are now driving business outcomes with the help of a near real-time, closed loop measurement and forecasting system that operationalizes predictive models in customer experience and revenue retention.
Key Issues
• What benefits result from using analytics that are based on actionable KPI models for desired business outcomes
• Why customer experience analytics are essential for predicting, measuring, and tracking business performance
• Why KPI-based and predictive models need to be integrated into the business, reporting and management processes vis-à-vis standalone
Expedia.com Case Study: Measuring and Responding to Customer Satisfaction: Creating a Closed-Loop Feedback System
Laura Edell, Senior BI Solutions Architect,Mantis Technology Group, Inc. , (Formerly with Expedia)
Expedia.com was experiencing a lack of visibility into understanding the breadth and depth of customer dissatisfaction with hotel reservations made via the website. In addition, shopping experiences were less than ideal due to booking errors either preventing a successful purchase or because of customer exasperation mid purchase costing revenue and new customer acquisition—two key goals for the company. Expedia used strategy maps to better understand the corporate targets, the customer satisfaction team build customer scorecards that measured customer satisfaction, call center experiences, shopping experiences including errors received and other clickstream website behaviors in order to understand "Voice of the Customer." This information was then statistically validated to tie back to the revenue goal and understand for each point of satisfaction gained or lost, how much revenue did that detract or contribute to the bottom line. The results were astounding and assisted with the President creating closed loop feedback circles whereby customers who had a negative experience with the brand could be retained by reaching out to them personally, fixing their issue, and granting them coupons for future purchases, thus contributing to both goals of growing revenue and customer acquisition/retention.
Key Issues
• Measuring qualitative customer satisfaction using quantitative methods/models
• Building feedback results to retain top customers, even after a negative experience
• Customer scorecards that contribute "Voice of the Customer" knowledge that result in meaningful insight and improve bottom line results
PayPal Case Study: Leveraging Analytics to Optimize Customer Experience and Increase Profitability
Piyanka Jain,Senior Manager, Global Product Analytics, PayPal
PayPal, a $2.8B financial services company with 81M active registered accounts struggled with finding the right product bundle for it’s clients which created a "win-win" scenario for PayPal and its merchant base. The prior strategy of offering "all" the products to "all" the merchants was high on visibility but low on targeting, resulting in low email campaign response rates and unrealized profits. In order to significantly increase cross-sell and up-sell performance while retaining customer loyalty in an increasingly challenging financial services marketplace, PayPal understood that it had to evolve its merchant engagement strategy quickly. In this session, learn how PayPal leveraged predictive analytics and developed their own product recommendation engine resulting in increased profitability and client satisfaction during a slowing economy.
Key Issues
• When to leverage / not to leverage predictive or advanced analytics
• How analytics-based decision making can improve customer and financial performance
• What results to expect from the field
General Dynamics Case Study: Driving Value through Collaboration
John P. Monczewski, Information Technology Director, BI / Enterprise Performance Mgmt, General Dynamics
General Dynamics is a $30B highly decentralized business with business units operating with a high degree of autonomy. General Dynamics understood that within large organizations, collaboration around Business Intelligence and Performance Management is critical to success. In the beginning of 2009, the company started on a journey working across 14 business units to focus on the extraordinary benefits of creating a collaborative environment. The objective was to drive down the total cost and time to value, while simultaneously driving up the quality of the solutions. Their approach, to create a Business Intelligence Collaborative (BIC) based on a BI Competency Center (BICC) model, has exceeded expectations and now includes multiple business units across General Dynamics.
Key Issues
• The value and challenges in establishing a BIC
• Why Collaboration is even more important in today’s business environment
• How Collaboration can be successful in any organization
The LEGO Group Case Study: Delivering Performance Management with a Framework that Fosters a Culture of Transparency, Accountability and Consistency
Henrik Amsinck,CIO and Vice President, The LEGO Group & Bruno Aziza,Co-Author, Drive Business Performance
Many organizations develop elaborate strategies but very few see them realized. Too often, executives approach their execution issues with technology or complex processes but disregard the important role of culture. In this session, Henrik Amsinck, Lego Group’s CIO and Bruno Aziza, co-author of the best-selling book, Drive Business Performance, will take you through Lego Group journey and will inspire you to what you need to do to develop a culture of performance and intelligent execution at your organization
Key Issues
• The importance of culture
• How KPIs can better support your strategy
• How to constantly listen to your customers and turn that knowledge into a competitive advantage