All insights
New business building — Sales growth — Strategy
Discovering business opportunities in South Korea
6 July 2018 — South Korea has been known as a rapidly growing prosperous economy, home to global conglomerates called chaebols. However, the actual opportunities and challenges of the South Korean market remain unknown to most foreign companies. Here we discuss recent developments in the South Korean economy, and what it means in terms of opportunities for market entry.
Turnaround and transformation
Building the skills of a Chief Transformation Officer
18 September 2017 — In a world of continuous change, companies should turn market pressure into a change capability that becomes a competitive advantage. Appointing a chief transformation officer to comprehensively lead change itself is a solution.
Strategy — M&A and divestments — Sales growth — New business building
Increasing agility in decision-making to improve competitiveness
3 October 2018 — Corporations must increasingly be agile and timely decisions are critical to initiate changes. Complex organizational structures, management by consensus and unstructured decision-making processes hinder agility in decision-making.
New business building — Sales growth — Productivity improvement
The untapped business opportunity in Southeast Asia – productivity improvement
30 March 2016 — Low productivity is the main challenge facing Southeast Asian economies. There is a macroeconomic imperative to boost productivity but implementation is difficult. In this article, we address automation, efficiency and human capital development as key new business development areas in the region.
Digitization
Leveraging social networking services with the power of Big Data
26 November 2015 — Consumption and connectivity of social networking services are steadily increasing due to widespread usage of cloud, mobile devices and the Internet of Things. The combination of cloud computing, mobile devices and connected sensors provides massive amounts of diverse data practically everywhere 24/7.
Digitization — Sales growth
Digital B2B customer portals – leveraging B2C learnings in the B2B world
15 September 2017 — With the increasing importance of customer experience across industries, B2B companies can differentiate by borrowing from the B2C playbook and simplifying their customer interface, facilitating relationship management, and developing digital customer portals.
Sales growth — Financial performance
Optimizing sales managers’ role in digital sales transformations
23 May 2019 — B2B organizations undergoing sales transformations tend to focus on improving digital tools and training for salespeople with insufficient guidance for sales managers. In this article, we discuss typical challenges in managing sales and what it takes for sales managers to both support and succeed personally in digital transformations.
Digitization
Indoor tracking and maps: The hype died, but the show is not over
6 March 2016 — Between 2013 and 2015 hype around indoor tracking built up. Yet today nobody seems to talk about indoor tracking or remember the apps. While the hype has died, work has continued in the shadows addressing both issues with tracking technology and indoor maps.
Program management — Turnaround and transformation
Managing complex programs – standardize and decentralize for efficiency and agility
28 March 2016 — In complex projects and programs, the choice of operating model (structure, processes and tools) is a key driver of success and execution efficiency. This article presents the evolution of a particularly complex technology program from a top-heavy organization to an agile “divisional” (self-contained) structure
Sales growth — M&A and divestments
Using systematic bolt-on acquisitions to drive growth
21 June 2011 — Companies seeking growth often balance between growing through organic business development, and inorganic growth through mergers and acquisitions. Organic development is slow, as it takes time to develop and launch new products and technologies, a new business line or broader geographic presence. Programmatic “bolt-on” acquisitions provide an alternative value creation path with manageable risk.
Financial performance
Improving decision-making by including uncertainty in budgets
14 April 2014 — Quantifying and estimating project and investment results are very important for financial planning, investment comparison and decision making purposes. However, business is always conducted in an uncertain environment while financial planning is commonly done using single-value revenue and cost-side estimates, which managers assess using rules of thumb. In this article, we present an approach where the best, base and the worst case scenarios are used to improve the estimates.
Financial performance
Beyond reporting – developing the CFO role to create value in SMEs
21 July 2017 — SMEs have limited resources and CFOs are often unable to spend enough time on strategic initiatives. Our simple framework is a tool to develop the finance function to enable CFOs to participate more actively in strategic initiatives and maintain a high-level perspective.