Who needs Business Intelligence and Shared Services anyways?

Picture this, You are a high profile Entreprenuer heading a midsized organization or a VP working for a Fortune 500 company.

You are strategist, visionary and talented honcho,who is looking for newer opportunities to expand your companies horizon.

You also know that improving operational efficiency and doing "kaizan" will give enough needed cushion for your team to execute business operations much better,than otherwise.

• How do I improve operational efficiency?
• With Budgets shrinking,no net new customers getting added,how do i increase my profitability?
• In what departments I need to increase budgets, how is the budget increase justified?
• Can I do an M & A to increase my new customer base? But that also squeezes my current cashflow and does not improve my balance sheet.
  I have to improve my sales efficiency, Sales operation effectiveness without affecting the existing setup
• I have to decrease my IT spend,increase operative effectiveness
  
• In order to improve my marketing effectiveness ,do i have enough resources who can do the execution and still not worry about the mundanes of updating the systems and operations
• How do i increase my process effeciencies?
• Do I need to buy new softwares to achieve where I need to be?

These are some of many questions that any Mid size to large size organizations would be facing.

If you have more of these questions ,and if you answered "Yes" to most of these questions above , you will need help from a Shared Services who will help you in getting where you want to go,and leverage best practices ,to attain good operational effiencies.

These questions time and again haunt every other entreprenuer,but one of the approaches to make it happen is set a low cost shared services organization, this will not only free up your valuable resources but also to concentrate and focus on important organization/business priorities.

Another thing that always pops up is :

My marketing spend is too much ,I have not got good quality leads so far, many of the opportunities are getting lost due to competition. What should I do?

I am spening my marketing budget on the third party leads , All the leads that my marketing
folks do the cold calls, most of them are bad leads ,how do i prevent eroding precious dollars?

Some Camapigns do extremely well in bring opportunities and getting coverted to order, but others do not why ?

Do i know my customer pretty well? What is he buying ? What is his consuming patterns?
What are his preferences?

Can i do an upsell or a cross sell to him ?

If you answered a "may be" or a "no" then you would defienitely want to have Business Intelligence solution in place. This not only leverages the existing businesses , but also pin points
on the basis of data ,of what you need to do, what decisions you need to take etc.


If you have more questions on Shared Services and Business Intelligence ,please do write to me @ rajeev.raghunath@gmail.com ,I will be happy to answer them.