Achieving
AGILITY:
the key to
competitive
advantage
Faced with the unpredictability of a faltering economic recovery, medium-sized businesses are arriving
at the same conundrum: how do you prepare for victory tomorrow without jeopardising survival
today? The solution: turn the uncertainty in the marketplace to your advantage; ready your company
to respond faster to changing circumstance than the competition, move more swiftly to capitalise on
fleeting opportunities and with greater assurance to circumvent pitfalls. In a word, agility.
Here, we describe how to fine tune your business
processes, improve service levels and reduce waste, all
with the objective of freeing up more human, physical
and financial resources to gain a competitive advantage.
This can all be achieved using familiar Microsoft
technologies that you may already own, meaning
significant improvements in your operational agility can
be realised almost immediately and at little or no cost.
Act with confidence
Sarah Burnett, senior research analyst at Butler Group,
believes this is precisely where Business Intelligence
(BI) technology comes to the fore. She says that only
enlightened organisations who make good use of their
corporate information will empower themselves to
increase sales and remain competitive.
“BI helps managers and staff make informed decisions
by measuring performance against planned targets.
If targets are missed, you can drill into the data to
identify the problem and fix it. BI also enables
organisations to examine income and expenditure in
detail, uncovering cost savings. Users can segment
customers and analyse their spending patterns to
identify new sales opportunities.”
More than ‘a nice to have’
The foundation of every agile organisation is the ability to
make strong decisions quickly. To this end it is imperative
you have clear, present and accurate information about
your business and its position in the marketplace. This
insight can be garnered from the structured approached
to data management, analysis and reporting offered by
modern Business Intelligence (BI) technologies.
“BI removes barriers to finding and using data, and helps
everyone to collaborate more easily and make more
informed decisions,” says Morris Novello, SQL product
manager at Microsoft UK. “It empowers individuals and
teams to gain better control of knowledge by producing
richer reports, setting up collaborative sites, and better
managing of day-to-day performance.”
To help your organisation realise the value of BI without
disrupting employees’ existing work patterns, Microsoft
solutions employ the familiar Microsoft® Office interface. In
fact, it’s very likely your organisation already uses some of
these tools:
• Microsoft Excel® – the world’s most popular personal BI productivity tool.
• Microsoft SharePoint® Server – the platform for organised team collaboration and information sharing.
• Microsoft PerformancePoint Services – performance management tools for your entire organisation.
• Microsoft SQL Server® – the backbone of Microsoft BI, a proven integration server used by thousands of companies to propagate real-time data between
the cloud, desktops and applications.
Over many years of development and numerous iterations,
Microsoft has made BI software much easier to use,
more collaborative and, above all, significantly cheaper.
Novello explains, “As a midsize business, you now have an
affordable entry point for BI and a realistic growth path.
For instance, Excel 2010 is an excellent introduction to BI,
scaling up seamlessly to PerformancePoint Services within
SharePoint 2010. At this level, your capabilities include
robust enterprise-wide reporting, decision-making and
performance management, with company data held in a
structured, centralised and secure way – and it’s available
whenever it’s needed.”
Thanks to this scalable approach, Microsoft BI gives you the
insight you need to make informed decisions without the
need for major capital investment – so if you’re nervous
about over-committing yourself, you can now opt to
implement particular elements of a BI system, rather than
adopt a big bang approach.
Be in the right place at the right time
Promoting operational agility across your organisation will
enable you to allocate more resource to the generation,
pursuit and conversion of sales leads. But the story doesn’t
end there; by maximising the efficiency of your sales
teams you can make even larger gains in market share.
A good starting place is Microsoft Unified
Communications (UC) technology. Bringing various
communication channels, technologies and devices
together, UC enables your employees to communicate,
collaborate and work together with customers and
colleagues – regardless of time and location.
“UC not only saves you money by reducing travel, but also
increases revenue by making employees more effective,
even when they are out of the office,” says Steve Tassell,
Microsoft UK’s Unified Communications Manager. “For
instance, Microsoft LiveMeeting™ remotely connects your
employees with colleagues and customers, allowing them
to conduct real-time meetings, training sessions and other
events from any PC with an Internet connection.
“They can brainstorm and collaborate with others by
sharing presentations and whiteboards via a hosted
web-conferencing application. Live Meeting can also help
make significant savings on your utility costs by extending
your home working and flexible working policies.”
For those seeking an even greater range of
communications, Lync™ Server 2010 brings real-time
communications like instant messaging (IM), audio and
video conferencing, and Voice over Internet Protocol
(VoIP) together in one place. Integrating neatly with
Office and SharePoint Server, Lync also includes ‘presence’
services, allowing your employees to check the availability
of colleagues from their desktops and start an IM
conversation with a single click.
Retain customer loyalty
Attracting new customers and retaining established ones
shouldn’t be mutually exclusive activities, even in a troubled
economy. Indeed, by taking a more agile approach to
customer service, using today’s customer relationship
management (CRM) technology, the two can easily go
hand in hand.
By providing a single platform that enables your
customer-facing staff to manage each relationship – from
initial contact right through to post-sales – a system
like Microsoft Dynamics® CRM can help you build more
fruitful relationships with existing customers and forge
firm relationships with new ones. Encapsulating CRM best
practices, it’s an affordable technology that uses the familiar
Microsoft® Outlook and Office interfaces to streamline your
business processes, identify new avenues for business growth
and automate workflows.
“Workflow is an essential element of automated business
today. It enables the creation of uniform processes that save
salespeople’s time and ensure vital stages aren’t overlooked,
allowing greater levels of productivity,” says Natalie Ayres,
COO at Virtual IT, a one-stop shop managed IT solutions
provider offering hosted Dynamics CRM. “By providing
instant access to decision-driving information, Dynamics
CRM helps ensure customers don’t slip under the radar.
“This could include booking an initial meeting, e-mailing the
customer to confirm, closing off the meeting and recording
what was said, a reminder to send a proposal document and
arrange a follow-up meeting, and an e-mail thanking the
customer for their order,” says Ayres. “There’s no customer
requirement that we can’t meet cost effectively with
Dynamics CRM. Microsoft has a great product that works
straight out of the box and doesn’t cost the earth.”
By keeping track of each customer’s history, your staff will
also be more professional during sales calls as they’ll have
all the relevant information readily to hand. And whether
they’re in the office or on the road, it will give them 24/7
access to data – via the web or Smartphone, online or
offline – enabling them to respond quickly to customers
and capitalise on opportunities as they arise.
Dynamics CRM has already helped many organisations save
money and improve their relationships with customers.
What’s more, analyst Gartner reports that companies with
excellent customer service achieve higher sales as well.
Reduce your IT waste
You’re now well on the way to increasing agility and boosting
performance. But what about your outgoings? Surviving the
current downturn and winning business from competitors
means keeping costs down while maintaining your
competitive edge. Here again, Microsoft’s new technologies
and management processes are just the ticket.
Virtualisation, for example, uses software to create virtual
machines (VM) that imitate a physical computer, letting you
run several operating systems and programs at the same
time on a single physical machine – optimising physical
resource and significantly reducing hardware requirements.
“Rather than forking out on rows of under-utilised servers,
each devoted to a specific task, server virtualisation lets you
group those workloads on a much smaller number of more
fully used machines,” says Lucas Searle, Virtualisation Lead
for Microsoft UK. “The result is a much better return on
your hardware investment, and it saves you further money
because it requires less management, consumes less energy,
and takes up far less space.”
Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Windows® 7 are certainly
two products designed to save you money while increasing
agility. A key feature of Windows Server is Hyper-V™, a
virtualisation technology that consolidates your physical
servers. By including Hyper-V in the price of Windows
Server 2008, Microsoft has also made virtualisation highly
affordable. Companies using virtualisation report savings
of up to 80 per cent on their server infrastructure, plus
improved efficiency averaging 40 per cent.
Accounting firm Tenon Group, for example, saved around
£100,000 in operational costs , while successfully expanding
its business, by deploying Windows Server 2008 with
Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.
Agility is everything
Agility and efficiency are prime drivers of competitive
advantage. Your organisation’s ability to adapt to changes
in the market more quickly and more effectively than your
competition will determine your success. The big question
is, do you believe your current approach to implementing
change will allow you to be a leader in your market or will
you always be running to catch up?
For more information
Please visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/en/gb/mediumbusiness/
solutions/agility-efficiency.aspx
© 2011 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.