How to Grow or Fix your business using Daydream’s Transformation Journey.
Our Drivers: Operational, Flexible, Step by step implementation, Existing Data utilization, Collaborative working, Sales & Market Strategy Efficiency, Daydream Innovation
Glossary: Porter 6 Analysis (Porter 6); Competitive Analysis (CompA); Cost-to-Serve Policies (Co2S); Pricing Simulation (PriceSim); Pipeline Strategic Analysis (PipeAn); Churn Analysis (Churn)
Our research Drivers: Operational, Flexible, Step by step implementation, Existing Data utilization, Collaborative working, Sales & Market Strategy Efficiency, Daydream Innovation, Salesforce.com integration
Introduction
Many companies are suffering today from being too focused on short-term operational decisions, whereas what truly matters for their development and growth is to focus on long-term strategy. Driving their strategic execution to find the correct balance between short-term and long-term objectives is always a challenging task. One of the main sources of difficulty in this process is often the lack of adapted tools and collaborative teamwork enabling them to evaluate and define their strategy across the company, with a Methodology that will last several years.
Even though tools for strategic planning exist in most companies, they often lack flexibility and maintainability. In fact, international companies are faced with great challenges regarding data collection and handling due to the number of Employees involved in the strategic planning process and the various local requirements.
Monitoring this strategic planning process is difficult, as such a process not only involves multiple actors deployed across numerous countries but also multiple data sources coming in different formats from different systems, often summed-up in a complex spreadsheet, making real-time feedback almost impossible.
In this article, we will explain how the new Daydream A3 Suite of application can help businesses to overcome these difficulties, and therefore create sustainable growth and reduce costs to access markets.
The A3 Suite and Anaplan: Daydream’s solution for collaborative strategic planning
To address these strategic planning difficulties, Daydream developed a strategic suite relying on Anaplan, a cloud-based system for business planning. The A3 Suite is aimed at helping companies in their strategic planning process and Market Strategy Development, from the conception of the Market Strategy to the monitoring and implementation of the decisions for Operational Sales and New Business Development. The tools offered in the Suite can be used separately, each of them being focused on a specific step of the Transformation Journey, or work together to accompany customers through the complete process.
Thanks to Anaplan’s structure, the A3 Suite overcomes most of the issues mentioned about the strategic planning process. The cloud-based structure provides a high degree of flexibility and is compatible with the most commonly used CRM and planning tools for seamless data integration.
Data handling is at the core of Anaplan, and its processing power allows the A3 Suite users to work with a great deal of flexibility on multi-dimensional issues, such as multi-clients, multi-markets and multi-areas business development strategies. And A3 Suite can be easily integrated in Salesforce.com.
Exploiting this information is easy thanks to the advanced user management features in every app of the A3 Suite, which grant access to different dashboards depending on the user profile and makes sure that users are never submerged by unwanted information. Those features also allow for multiple and simultaneous data entries from various users without risking damage to the structure of the model, speeding up the strategic planning process.
The main advantages of Anaplan are illustrated in the figure below.
Figure 1 – The Anaplan Planning Solution
3 Steps, 6 Apps: Daydream’s Transformation Journey
To make the transformation process more explicit, we create three Daydream’s Transformation Journey Phases. These phases are the same regardless of the approach conducted, which can be “Fix” or “Grow”.
“Fix-Grow” approach: Understanding the need for a transformation
To better understand the need for a strategic transformation, and conceive tailor-made apps that can be used for every transformation journey, we developed the “Fix-Grow” approach. This approach is based on the observation that two main reasons can push a company towards a strategic transformation path: it either wants to “Fix” its business, meaning that the company will focus on internal cost reduction and strategic adaptations to save cash where it can, or it wants to “Grow”, as a result its strategy will be more outwards focused, looking for new markets and growth prospects.
Figure 2 – Fix-Grow approach criteria
In both cases, the A3 Suite will be able to give customers valuable insights and track the transformation process from beginning to end.
3 Steps of the Transformation Journey: Analysis, Action, Monitoring
The three steps are backed by 6 Apps, 2 per step, aimed at providing valuable insights for each phase. The overview of the A3 Suite structure can be seen below:
Figure 3 – Presentation of the A3 Suite
Define Phase
The Define phase is the first part of the transformation journey, and probably the most important one, as it will set the course for the whole transformation path. In this phase, companies define their strategy according to their analysis of the competitive environment. Our tools enable users to save time and money on the analysis of this environment by providing ready-to-use customizable analysis frameworks.
The Porter 6 (Porter 6) app is based on the famous Five Forces of Porter, and focuses solely on the interactions between the company and its external environment. Using Anaplan’s cloud capabilities, the tool allows users to enter criteria and items that seem relevant for the strategic analysis regarding their respective market, and to rate and filter those inputs according to their importance, shortening a time-consuming data collection process and making it more comprehensive by easily including more actors.
The Competitive Analysis (CompA) can be built upon the analysis done with the Porter 6 app and is aimed at quantifying the inside-out and outside-in inputs collected during a classic SWOT analysis, to be able to compare competitors over markets, products or areas. As for Porter 6, the data collection process is simplified thanks to the cloud connectivity, and both inside-out performance (internal view) and outside-in performance (external view) are attributed importance ratings. This systematic rating process provides reliable quantitative output from a usually qualitative process, as presented in Figure 4.
Figure 4 – Output dashboard from the Competitive Analysis App
Farm Phase
The Farm Phase’s objective is to convert the output from the previous phase into action, focusing more specifically on their impacts on the company products and sales. In order to do so, Daydream developed two complementary apps that can, as for the rest of the A3 Suite, be used separately or work together to provide better insights.
The Cost-to-Serve Policies application (Co2S) is based on the concept of Cost-to-Serve analysis, which is a powerful tool to increase companies’ sales efficiency. Conducting a Cost-to-Serve analysis enables companies to break down costs and relate them to their existing customers, including overhead, service and opportunity costs. This type of analysis, conducted on specific business units (for example the ones identified during the Define Phase) will provide valuable indicators on changes needed for fairer pricing, as every client requires and different level of service, service that is not always taken into account in the billing process.
Daydream’s application is not conducting the Co2S analysis for the company, as the analysis will be strongly dependent on the level of precision wanted or needed for each company, but it provides a powerful visualization tool for the results, and lets managers conduct sensitivity analysis in real-time to plan the changes required. The app will also help customers to create, adapt and summarize the new business policies put in place following the analysis.
The Pricing Simulation (PriceSim) app is working in a complementary field and lets users conduct sensitivity analysis in product price variations, taking into account customer’s price elasticity.
Both applications can be connected to production planning software to ease the product data retrieval process, and possess the same level of granularity in the segmentation (client, market, area …) as the analysis apps. They also both integrate our user management functionalities, making data collection coherent and easy even from various teams spread all across the world and divided in complex structures.
Hunting Phase
The last phase of the transformation journey is about developing a customer centric approach and anticipating eventual future adaptations needed. More specifically, Daydream’s tools are focused on both the Pipeline Strategic Analysis (PipeAn) and the Attrition Rate (Churn).
The Pipeline Strategic Analysis (PipeAn) app analyses companies’ sales pipelines, always with the same level of granularity and easy data collection, wrapping all the information collected into simple and understandable graphical dashboards.
The Churn app analyses current sales performances and compares it with previous years to identify signals that might indicate client loss, for precise attrition monitoring, and gives indicators to identify reasons behind the loss. As the application is used, it is possible to refine the model to be able to identify weak signals that help anticipate and prevent those client losses.
Figure 5 – Pipeline Dashboard
Conclusion
In this article, we have introduced the new Daydream A3 Strategic Suite, a powerful cloud tool to create, implement and monitor an efficient Market Strategy.
Even though the A3 Suite is designed to work as a complete package, with all applications interacting between each other, they can also be run independently.
All this APPS could be integrated with Salesforce.com or SAP CRM.
For a tighter fit with your specific needs or help about integrating database and external tools into the A3 Suite, please contact us directly.
To contact us: contact@daydream.eu
