Business Intelligence - Real time control of your organization is now a reality

As a senior executive you have several business priorities that you need to track and keep up to date with. But with the vast amounts of information pouring onto your desk, emails, and voice mail, how can you keep up?

The ability to have your finger on the pulse of your organization is critical not only to your own personal success, but to the growth of the organization.

Imagine a system where you could:

• Have an Executive Dashboard where you can get a high-level overview of the key business drivers and performance indicators for your organization


• Dynamically analyze your market in real time by tracking your sales versus product categories


• Drill down by product categories and analyze Sales growth


• Quickly identify your top 10 customers and perform year over year comparisons


• Perform What-if analysis and project the impact to your sales forecast


• Make changes on the fly and have the system be responsive to your changing needs and not cost a lot of money or take long to implement.

Sound like fantasy to you? Well now there is a solution out there that will enable your organization to do this quickly and at low cost.

Hawaii Business Consulting's Business Intelligence Services ® is the solution you have been waiting for. Leveraging Oracle's new Business Intelligence Beans (BI Beans) Hawaii Business Consulting can take your business information and create a dynamic and secure web interface that allows you to put your finger on the pulse of your organization.

Click on the links below to see screen shots of a generic company implementation.

1. Executive Dashboard that shows your Key Performance indicators


2. Product Category Market Analysis


3. Sales Growth Analysis


4. Margin Analysis


5. Customer Region and Market Analysis


6. Growth and Margin Analysis


7. What If Analysis

Summary

• In less than 30 days you can be up and running


• You can host it in your current environment, or we can host it for you


• Runs completely independent and parallel to you current systems


• Completely customized to your requirements

Call (808) 224-0470 to get your free assessment on how you can get started with business intelligence.

Beating Back Bureaucracy - Killing the weeds that stifle the growth of your organization

Bureaucracies are inherent in large organizations. The number of layers from lowest level employee to the top is the order of that company's bureaucracy. Too high of an order of bureaucracy results in too much delegation and not enough action or results.

Bureaucracy exists in all large corporations...How do you fight it?

Let's take a look at an example and see what you would do:

You are responsible for a large department. Currently there is a situation that is happening that will cost your company a lot of money, but the problem is that it is highly political. If you take a stand on it and deal with it you risk facing retaliation, but if you play along you get your bonus. Your bonus payoff is based upon your actions and the actions of the rest of the organization... What will you do?

Payoff Table for Political Decision



The way to read this table is as follows:

There is a bonus amount of $200K to be split amongst the organization. If you or the rest of the organization take a stand on the issue your bonus payout is dependent on the strategy of the other party. For example if you take a stand and the rest of the organization plays along the bonus payout ($0K, $200K) means that you will get nothing ($0K) and the rest of the organization will get $200K. Now if both parties take a stand the bonus payout is ($50K, $50K) and this is due to the fact that companies in general tend to hate to deal with political issues and due to dealing with the issue everyone's bonus will be less.

So what should people do? And more importantly what will people in general do? Let's look at Game Theory and see what it tells us:

DEFINITION: Nash Equilibrium If there is a set of strategies with the property that no player can benefit by changing their strategy while the other players keep their strategies unchanged, then that set of strategies and the corresponding payoffs constitute the Nash Equilibrium.

The Nash Equilibrium tells us that in general all people will choose to play along, because you can't get a better outcome regardless of the other parties choice. For example, if you thought about taking a stand you would quickly realize that if the rest of the organization played along you would lose your bonus. Conversely if you played along at worst you will have $100K, and at best you will have $200K.

But what happens if everyone does this?

Playing along is a short term strategy. If everyone plays along then organizations begin to deteriorate from within. Those that take a stand will be less inclined to do so in the future, or will leave for other companies.

Bureaucracy is self healing. It is easier to do nothing than to take a stand on an issue.But in order for the culture of an organization to change, a couple of people need to spark the change and take a stand.While it is self healing, it often costs a company more in the long run and is not self-sustaining for the long run.

All of this is highly dependent on corporate culture. If enough people take a stand there is a chance for change. If not nothing will change until it is too late.

Organizations need leaders within their company to tackle these problems. Find out what kind of Leadership profile you have in fighting bureaucracy:

Click here to take the Leadership Profile Quiz

Summary

• Hold people accountable... Really!


• Reduce the order of bureaucracy within an organization.


• Reward those who do the right thing for the company, and punish those that don't.

If not, you deal with the consequences!

Virtual Sales Force - A unique approach to automating your sales force

We all know that salespeople cost money, and salespeople don’t and can't work 24 hours a day. Yet customers in general tend to be apprehensive about interacting with salespeople, and customers spend a large amount of time on the Internet before they buy. But customers still want to interact with a human...or at least something that appears human before closing the deal!

Is there some way that we can still achieve both goals? Can we have interactive salespeople that work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and not worry about them asking for an additional commission?



The answer may lie with Virtual Salespeople from SitePal.

These highly customizable and talking avatars can be easily incorporated into your corporate website. With its text-to-speech conversion it allows dynamic information from your corporate database. And most importantly they are willing to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and never ask for a commission!

Dodge/Chrysler/Jeep Promotion

At www.discoveryourride.com customers are asked personality based questions to derive what type of car the customer should drive. Interactive questions with the Sales avatar make the experience fun and easy to use. Through the process it narrows the car options for the customer and leads them down to closing the deal.

Other applications could be to use it for your customer service desk, billing & payment information, or an informational kiosk.

By integrating it with your corporate database you can automate routine tasks while still giving it a personal touch. By providing interactive content that is engaging you will find that customers tend to respond and interact more than before.

Summary

• Routine tasks and new promotions would benefit from this technology


• It provides a human touch with the tirelessness of a computer


• Virtual Salespeople will never replace all salespeople but it is a good way to handle the Internet channel

Revitalizing your Business with Technology

A common scenario for most mature companies that have been in business for more than 10 years, is that they either still run a major part of their business with the original technology infrastructure from when they started the company, or they have an amalgam of technology infrastructures, partially implemented software applications, and multiple systems that need to be integrated from previous acquisitions.

Sound familiar?

Don't be too disturbed. There are very few companies out there that have a perfect business and technology integration infrastructure. That is because just when you think you have it all integrated, the business changes and you now have a new system to integrate or a new acquisition to consolidate.

It's an evolutionary cycle in which the technology and business infrastructure has to grow as you are growing your business. Imagine a company when it first starts as a newborn child, and (bear with the analogy) imagine the clothing you provide for your child as your technology and business infrastructure. You provide clothing to that child as he grows. You consistently buy new shoes, shirts, and pants in bigger sizes as the child continues to grow.

But what would happen if one day you decided it was just too expensive to continue purchasing clothes for your child, as they got older, and that you could save a lot of money if you just stopped buying clothes for your child when they were five years old? You could argue that if his feet got too big you could just cut off the tips of the shoes and let his feet expand. Or you could patch together a number of shirts to create an even bigger shirt, etc., etc.

Your child would be busting at the seams of its clothing, as would your business suffer from the lack of infrastructure. This example seems comical because we know that no parent would stop buying their children clothes, except unfortunately I have seen many companies stop investing in their infrastructure and suffer the consequences.

Below is a step-by-step process I use with clients when helping them align their technology infrastructure with their business objectives.

1. Identify process inefficiencies

You need to have a firm grasp of where the bottlenecks are in your cash flow. Don't worry about chasing after the new fad in technology or what your competitors are doing, focus on what is going to generate revenue or cut costs for your business.

Many executives make the mistake of deciding what the root causes are without doing any analysis. There is nothing wrong with having gut instinct, but make sure you get it validated with real data. Engaging a third party has the benefit of a non-biased observer that can pull the details together without the fear of internal politics.

2. Have a technology roadmap

I was once working with a business executive that stated that his company's website needed to be changed immediately. When I asked him specifically what did he feel needed to be changed, his only response was "I don't know...everything!" I like to call this approach the "Fire, fire, fire, ready, aim" strategy or also known as the "Boil the ocean" approach.

If you don't know where you are going any path can get you there. But at what cost, and what detriment to your business? You need to spend the time to clearly identify business objectives of what you want to achieve from where you are today. Without clear business objectives it is impossible to put together a technology roadmap that will be of value to the business.

3. Develop and motivate your staff

Any time you undergo major changes in your infrastructure it has a major effect on your staff. Your staff needs to see how do they fit into the equation, and how do they derive value from the change.

The approach I recommend is to insure you enable people with the appropriate training, support, and give them new tasks to tackle. You insure that it is enough of a stretch so they can grow from the experience. The mechanism is Darwinian, some will make it; others won't.

But throughout this process you need to hold people accountable, and that includes yourself! It's not good enough to delegate all of the responsibility, and expect things to happen. You need to actively monitor the process. Credit needs to roll down to the people actually doing the work, and accountability needs to roll up. Be careful if you are insulated from those getting the work done by several layers of management. If projects fail often it is not those doing the work that are at fault: They may be working with inadequate resources, unrealistic timeframes, and worst of yet most of them might not feel comfortable telling you till it is too late.

4. Be wary of those vendors looking to "help"

Some just want to help themselves to your profits! Many executives when discussing technology transformation feel they are washed out to sea with technology jargon and multiple options, and all they want is a simple solution to solve their business problems.

Many a great promise has been made on PowerPoint presentations, but only to fail miserably in actual results. Steer clear of multi-year projects with no clear deliverables. Demand real ROI, hard dollars not soft and fuzzy projections, that have to be achieved within the year.

You should question any vendor that will not give you a 30-day out clause from your contract. Being locked into a bad contract can impede your company's ability to grow and be more dynamic.

Remember you can't spend yourself out of a problem. Make the vendors earn your business, just like you have to earn your own customer's business.

5. Start small... think big

It is often tempting to take on larger projects because it has more splash and sizzle. I worked with one company that had a 10-year plan on how it was going to change its technology infrastructure. Two years into it, it was cancelled. Realistically businesses cannot afford to run this way, especially if the business plan of today will soon change tomorrow.

Approach projects in increments. Smaller investments allow you to be dynamic and responsive to the business and your customers. It is better to invest $50K into one small project, and if it succeeds invest more. Rather than spending $1 million and hoping that it works.

Bear in mind that you can’t turn a company around overnight, and it is going to take time and persistence to make it happen. Most people cannot be turned 180 degrees at one time, but most can be changed one degree at a time. If you can consistently persuade and show them 180 times, you can get people to change.

Changing a corporate culture and people requires a lot of work. Change is scary for many people. Have a thick skin and don’t let minor setbacks derail you. Often using an external party to be the change agent allows more people to feel that they are on equal footing and they will be more willing to participate.

Summary

• If you want to revitalize your company you have to know what your issues are.


• Stay focused with a roadmap that can get you from where you are now to where you want to be.


• Take care of your people or there will be no one to take care of you.


• Make sure you are getting value for what you pay for.


• It’s a marathon not a race. Driving corporate change is difficult but the benefit to the company is significant.


• Have a thick skin and don’t let minor setbacks derail you.


• The process can be complex. Utilize a third party that has experience in this area to help effect the change.

Welcome to Hawaii Business Consulting, LLC

Hawaii Business Consulting is a technology consulting company that provides business process analysis, data-legacy system migration and integration, custom software development and technology assessment to major corporations in Hawaii.

Hawaii Business Consulting is not a new company. I first began the company almost 7 years ago when I first returned to Hawaii to implement technology solutions on Kauai where I was raised. I wanted to bring back all the skills and expertise that I had gained on the mainland and leverage that to help enable the businesses on Kauai grow with technology. However I soon began to realize that the new Internet Business Solutions that I was trying to sell, was almost akin to selling nuclear reactors to people who just discovered fire. The concept was good but MY timing was WAY off! (smile)

Now I am on the island of Oahu, and over the past two years I have seen a lot of companies here in Hawaii desperately trying to get a handle of how can they utilize technology to enable their business. My expertise is in helping companies align their business strategies so that technology can provide value and enable its execution.

But what I primarily do is work with senior executives to leverage technology to help them meet their business strategy and objectives.

Let's face it; technology for many people, especially senior executives, is a bit of an enigma. In the last twenty years that technology has grown in leaps and bounds, most senior executives have been running companies day-to-day without the help of most of the latest and greatest technology solutions that we currently have. They have made business decisions on gut instinct, experience, and a helpful dose of good luck. So why should things change now?

Because the world has become a much smaller place. Automation via technology and the Internet are making technology an even more competitive weapon in the marketplace. Technology is rapidly eroding the niches of opacity that many companies have happily operated under which allowed them to live within a margin of error and inefficiency because their customers didn't know any better.

Now it has become much harder. With the pervasiveness of technology and the Internet into every aspect of our lives customers are now better informed, have more choices, and expect more for less. This puts extreme downward pressure on prices as companies attempt to fix the problem by just lowering prices.

But lowering prices without identifying their core business problems only exacerbates the problem. Companies who blindly stumble thinking that pricing is the only solution without taking a close hard look at their internal operations will slowly enter a death spiral of inefficiency, increased customer dissatisfaction, and increased unprofitability. Or worse companies become deluged in all the technology choices, options, and configurations that are possible with technology that they either never get started or begin very expensive exercises in futility.

But thankfully with the technology tools that are available today, and with the right partner to provide insight on the proper implementation and utilization of these technologies into the business practices, technology will serve as a compass to lead many companies out of the storm of confusion. However, there will still be unfortunately many that never make it, primarily because they steadfastly hold on to the belief that the way they have done things for twenty years should still be the way they do it for twenty more.

The goal of this website is not to just promote the services of Hawaii Business Consulting, but more importantly to spark discussion and dialogue regarding critical problems facing senior executives as they formulate their business strategy and execute on their plan. I will be presenting articles on a weekly basis regarding issues that effect companies when implementing either new technologies or new business strategies. Feel free to email me any topics that you would like to see covered or issues that you are facing within your own companies and you can rest assured that all topics will be anonymized as to which company it comes from.

Join me as we explore how technology can be sucessfully leveraged by businesses, and the traps and pitfalls that await those that do not know how to execute.

Aloha,

Soren