Business value accelerators

Improving financial and operational performance

This economic environment is unlike anything in the past. There has been unprecedented constraints on access to credit and capital; unwinding of over-leverage, falling demand, increased price sensitivityas consumers and enterprises cut back, and disruptions in supply chains, partner and customer arrangements. Today’s business environment shows signs of improvement, but there is much uncertainty with customer demand, business expansion and consumer and commercial credit. Traditional responses no longer suffice in the current economic environment – success requires a willingness and discipline to act with speed to exploit short-term opportunities and long-term sustainability. To achieve these goals, you need a pragmatic and robust approach to revenue optimization and cost reduction.

Is your operating model aligned to successfully execute your company’s long-term strategy? Do you need to manage and integrate your organization and processes on a more regional or global basis? Are you able to directly and rapidly implement changes to operational processes? IBM’s assessments or accelerators can make recommendations about organization and process changes that increase effectiveness, reduce costs and potentially increase revenue to help create significant value across the enterprise.

• Strategic Profit Improvement (425KB)

  Meet financial objectives and find improvements in cost reduction, revenue growth and capital optimization. The Strategic profit improvement assessment makes recommendations about organization and process changes that increase effectiveness, reduce costs and potentially increase revenue to help create significant value across the enterprise.

• Enterprise Innovation Strategy Accelerator (521KB)

  Understand innovation capabilities, structures, processes, assets, tools, methods and an innovation archetype. This accelerator provides a rapid high level assessment and road map to help you understand innovation capabilities, and evaluate and refine an innovation agenda to align with your defined business strategy.

• Cloud-enabled Business Model Accelerator (462KB)

  Prioritize business model innovation opportunities around changing the value chain, creating new revenue streams, changing your product mix, or altering the way a business operates across its extended enterprise. This strategy initiative focuses on identifying cloud-enabled business model innovation opportunities and delivering a road map through interviews and workshop with key stakeholders.

• Target Operating Model Accelerator (456KB)

  Analyze all the elements within your operations - process, customer experience, sourcing, organization, metrics, skills, technology, and assets, as well as culture to improve your company’s overall business performance. This accelerator provides a framework to achieve operational innovation by linking a company’s business strategy to all of its operating elements in a manner which is rationalized, aligned and unified.

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Transforming finance and risk management to be a Value Integrator

Today’s CFO’s and finance departments are expected to provide their organizations with enterprise visibility and competitive edge by helping the business make decisions with a high degree of confidence. Leading organizations are becoming sophisticated in their ability to leverage analytics to better manage performance, avoid risk and address fraud.If there’s any certainty in the current economic environment, it’s that CFOs and their finance organizations are emerging from the global economic downturn with far greater influence at the enterprise level. Leading finance organizations are evolving to become“Value Integrators” by executing core Finance activities efficiently and providing the strategic insight their businesses need.

Inadequate processes and tools limit visibility and data quality, which constrains finance’s ability to develop and act upon business insights.These inefficiencies can also result in decreased control and increased risk. Our assessments deliver comprehensive solutions in critical financial management focus areas. These solutions help you address new risks and challenges and drive enterprise-wide profit improvement.

• BAO Jumpstart for Risk, Finance and Fraud (487KB)

  Make business decisions with a high degree of confidence and gain a competitive edge with enterprise visibility. This engagement provides you with a range of opportunities to deliver insight and business outcomes, including diagnostic assessments of your organization’s performance and fraud management capabilities along with tactical offerings focused on helping you gain greater business value from your current enterprise analytics investments.

• Finance Healthcheck (442KB)

  Improve your financial effectiveness by raising the quality of analytics and help your firm react faster to changes and threats. This assessment is for companies that are seeking to become Value Integrators by executing core finance activities efficiently and by providing the insights their businesses need.

• BAO Jumpstart for Strategic Alignment (487KB)

  Understand the biggest and highest value business opportunities to pursue with analytics. This assessment accelerates your analytics initiatives and helps you understand how to best get started by identifying areas of opportunity, evaluating current capabilities and providing a roadmap and next steps for achieving their objectives.

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Optimizing channel strategy to maximize value

Social networking, increased mobility, adoption of digital channels, increased consumer expectations and transparency across industries are just a few of the factors fundamentally reshaping customer interaction. Customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and have higher expectations of organizations. Enterprises are responding by adding new interaction models and enhancing channel capabilities. However the challenge for businesses today is figuring out where to invest by determining which capabilities will be most impactful to customers.

Most companies have no shortage of ideas on how to improve the customer experience. The real challenge is to select the right set of initiatives that maximize value, taking into account the dependencies on other elements of the operating model. Making the transition to interactive marketing is a journey that begins with executive commitment to a customer-centered organization. It requires achieving a 360-degree view of the customer, engaging customers in an on-going dialog, integrating this conversation across channels, and enabling all this with a solid, scalable marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute, track, and adjust all your marketing operations flexibly and efficiently. The assessments help you gain new customer insight using time-boxed data analytics designed to provide actionable insights that prove the concept and the value of moving your organization in this direction.

• BAO Jumpstart for Customer Insight (487KB)

  This assessment deliver a comprehensive vision and roadmap for a data driven marketing and sales organization as well as short term, problem focused data analysis to prove fast value and help you evaluate possibilities.

• Smarter Commerce - Cross-channel Experience Assessment (479KB)

  Rapidly develop a cross-channel strategy that reflects current customer trends and priorities. This channel strategy initiative focuses on defining key characteristics of target customer experience, revised channel mix, role of each channel (high level), and key capabilities.

• Smarter Commerce - Enterprise Marketing Management Assessment (500KB)

  This assessment helps you adopt Unica and Coremetrics technologies and integrate these tools with your core commerce capabilities. If you are considering Unica and Coremetrics software and want to ensure the highest level of ROI on your solution investment or if you have implemented Unica or Coremetric,s but have not maximized the ROI of the software due to not taking advantage of the full set of capabilities.

• Smarter Commerce - Customer Value Strategy Accelerator (496KB)

  Find a new strategy for growth, around a handful of new, high potential, value-propositions. This customer value strategy initiative focused on identifying new, breakthrough, business and smarter commerce models and positioning, created by the new and evolving needs of the social, digital, and mobile consumer.

• Smarter Marketing Accelerator (612KB)

  Capitalize on pervasive change to define a new path to value for marketing using the Smarter marketing accelerator. This accelerator is designed to help you envision the future of customer interactions and the marketing capabilities required to capture value. Through this engagement we analyze your current state against a future vision, identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement in marketing performance, and design the path to value based on prioritization of business capabilities and return on investment.

• Social Business Enterprise Strategy Accelerator (448KB)

  Increase customer insight and responsiveness and capitalize on collective intelligence (internal & external) for faster innovation. This short term strategy consulting engagement will help your organization build a roadmap for people, organizational, and technological change.

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Optimize and streamline operations

While globalization has yielded improvements in market reach and operational efficiencies, it has also increased the exposure to critical supply chain risk. Visibility, a top concern of supply chain executives, is a key enabler to combat the negative impact of supply chain variability and volatility. Effective visibility enables an organization to immediately anticipate, communicate and address critical exposure to supply chain risk spanning supplier management, operational excellence and customer management activities.

While at the same time, supply chain related costs comprise the majority of their cost structure and balance sheet. Therefore, cost and capital reduction are key drivers of profitability and return on capital. Leading companies will exploit short-term cost reduction opportunities as the foundation for longer term transformational programs. IBM specializes in identification and implementation of high-potential supply chain projects designed to deliver short-term cost reduction results.Our accelerated assessments are a proven approach to create a value-driven, prioritized implementation roadmap for optimizing the value from your supply chain.

• Supply Chain Visibility Assessment (587KB)

  Increase revenue due to enhanced customer service while reducing supply chain costs. This consulting engagement helps define a roadmap to implement end to end supply chain visibility. Using a proven approach, analytical tools and deep supply chain management expertise we help you create a prioritized visibility implementation plan based on benefits realization and other implementation considerations.

• Supply Chain Rapid ROI (1MB)

  Reduce cost in inventory, manufacturing and logistics, This consulting engagement helps define the 2-3 best ways to drive rapid cost savings. Using methods, analytical tools and IBM’s deep supply chain management expertise the assessment defines a cost reduction program and accelerates your path to benefits realization through initiatives such as inventory optimization, demand forecasting, spend reduction, or network optimization.

• SAP Strategic Alignment Assessment (471KB)

  Understand opportunities to enhance your existing SAP solution to support your supply chain objectives and reduce instances of redundancies and improve spans of controls. This assessment provides a rapid, yet comprehensive assessment of your existing SAP enterprise portfolio and related IT infrastructure to determine alignment with your business goals and strategic direction.

• Oracle Application Healthcheck (421KB)

  Increase the use of platforms that integrate best practices to improve operational efficiency. The healthcheck helps you with an Oracle footprint to assess the impact of your current enterprise architecture and identify opportunities to improve cost efficiency and performance improvements.

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Aligning your workforce and business strategy

Today’s businesses remain focused on two equally important goals – the need to simultaneously drive growth yet, at the same time, maintain operational efficiency. They anticipate, though, that achieving these goals in the future will mean working quite differently than many businesses do today – engaging much more seamlessly across a wide range of geographic, functional and generational boundaries and borders. This calls for an organization to be a “social business” that is open, where the employees are empowered and talent is recognized faster.

In addition, mobile is a unique opportunity to re-think the way businesses interact with customers, employees and partners. It offers a different value – As an always-connected communications tool, it is a unique platform to build intimacy with your desired audience. Mobile gives you the opportunity to anticipate user needs and deliver more relevant interactions by being aware of the user’s immediate context. This includes location, social situation and current activity, and enables an immediate value of context sensitive follow-up actions. These assessments are designed to develop an enterprise level mobile and social business vision and supporting rationale as well as a portfolio of mobile and social capabilities, while aligning your workforce strategy.

• Mobile Strategy Accelerator (896KB)

  Improve productivity for sales and field resources. This approach is designed to develop an enterprise level mobile business vision and supporting rationale as well as a portfolio of mobile capabilities and applications. The result is an actionable roadmap that optimizes mobile opportunities and accelerates time to market.

• Workforce & Talent Assessment (481KB)

  The Workforce and talent assessment analyzes your workforce strategy and assesses performance against industry best practices to identify areas for improvement. It provides a roadmap to implement the new workforce and talent management recommendations, as well as insights into the business benefits of working beyond borders.

• Social Business Enterprise Strategy Accelerator (448KB)

  Improve retention of young talent and better prospect identification. This short term strategy consulting engagement will help your organization build a roadmap for people, organizational, and technological change.

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Increase operational effectiveness

Many companies today face significant challenges in taking out cost and unlocking business value from their application portfolios. Large, complex application portfolios require significant investments of time and money just to maintain. Disconnected and inflexible systems, fragile coupling, duplication of function and data increase the costs of routine and business-mandated changes. A focused overall application portfolio management strategy is essential to ensure a company’s business agility and ability to innovate.

As organizations grow and merge, the accompanying growth of their IT often results in a mishmash of technologies and platforms that is difficult and costly to manage. This complexity makes is difficult for IT to support business requirements and adapt to changes in strategy and business direction. Organizations should align the current IT strategy, resources and investment to changes in business direction and corporate strategy. Additionally, organizations should ensure that their enterprise architecture allows quick reaction to changes in the marketplace. Our assessments can help you define the best ways to drive rapid cost savings – given your business and application-related challenges – and enable you to be future ready.

• Application Portfolio Assessment (515KB)

  Access industry and business best practices, leading-edge technologies and expertise beyond what is available in-house. The assessment enables you to quickly identify areas for process improvement and to develop a roadmap that includes priorities and strategies to better align the overall enterprise portfolio with the requirements of the business processes and models.

• IT Strategy and Performance Assessment (429KB)

  Better align your IT resources, investments and business strategies and increase IT flexibility to adapt to your changing business needs. This assessment utilizes best practices, and IBM’s unique, proprietary tools and methods.

• Enterprise Architecture Assessment (423KB)

  Achieve stronger alignment between IT strategy and business goals. This service uses IBM's expertise with enterprise architecture best practices and analytical tools to speed analysis and provide comprehensive recommendations for your enterprise architecture strategy.

• SAP Strategic Alignment Assessment (471KB)

  Align your executive team on what to do with your SAP environment in the next five years. The SAP strategic alignment assessment provides a comprehensive assessment of your existing SAP enterprise portfolio and related support elements in order to align these with your business goals and strategic direction.

• Oracle Application Healthcheck (421KB)

  Improve the efficiency of your IT investments. This assessment helps ensure that you are maximizing your opportunities for reducing operating costs, including purchasing, indirect labor costs, and system support costs.

• Cloud Application Virtualization

  Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your IT resource utilization. This engagement demonstrates the benefits of application virtualization by virtualizing a set of your application services and assessing the ability to optimize computing resources and simplify existing development and test management infrastructure.

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