Prestatie Management

Together with CompTIA we offer the opportunity to participate in the Noventum Service Management "Cost-to-Serve" Benchmark.  The objective is to provide pragmatic help to enable companies to steer a path out of recession, back to growth and to provide insight into how optimised your service operation is when compared to peers (potential competition).

This benchmark has been designed as an annual event to provide long-term insight into progression and developing trends in the industry, providing the ability to compare historical results with current results to identify strategic shifts. Specific benefits include:

• Visibility of true costs and capacity to allow manageable growth
• An external reference point for your own operation
• Insight into how service operations are creating low cost high value operations with reduced volumes
• Insight into trends
• Indication of the measures that are being used

The scope of the current study will be product related services, to reduce the time taken completing the questionnaire, increase its relevance and to ensure much easier comparison and highlight the merging of these types of service offering.

The Benchmark will measure around 50 key performance indicators - identified as the most important measures by a working party of 25 service professionals (representing a good cross selection of interested parties). We will also include trend information gathered during the benchmark.

Data will be collected on-line using an easy-to-use questionnaire (circa 45 minutes) with output in the form of a confidential report for each individual participant charting their own company results against the other participants.

The time taken to execute the benchmark will be minimal and feedback is planned for the end of March 2010.

The report will present your data, as shown below, to enable a rapid and easy comparison of your result with the rest of the participants. Each result graph will be described from information gathered across the whole participant group. We will also provide an executive summary as part of the output for dissemination within the business.

Summary of content is as follows:

1. Preface
2. Background
3. Introduction
4. Understanding and using the report
5. Executive Summary
6. Results
   Section I - Measures from a Financial Perspective
   Section II - Measures from a Customer and Stakeholder Perspective
   Section III - Measures from an Internal Business Perspective
   Section IV - Measures from Staff Development and Growth Perspective

The increasing need for innovation to drive growth in service means that:

• A broadening and developing role of service coupled with close attention to performance is now required to survive
• Knowing how your services compare to others in the industry is key to your company's survival and growth in the current economy.

Benchmarking is becoming an important mechanism for improving business operations. To provide some background, this article will illustrate key service aspects, including results from our latest benchmark, published at the start of the year.

For further information please contact us.

Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group

Recent research applying the results from a benchmark review has shown that the strategy adopted by the service operation impacts significantly upon the revenue and margin performance of the business as a whole.

Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group

Recent research applying the results from a benchmark review has shown that the strategy adopted by the service operation impacts significantly upon the revenue and margin performance of the business as a whole.

In addition the research confirms that success comes from constructing a successful strategy and delivering it into an effective operation, creating loyal, satisfied customers, while strongly growing revenue and profit. However the benchmark aspect of the research also confirms that establishing an operation that best delivers the business strategy is a major challenge, but when successfully accomplished is shown to deliver a handsome financial reward. Finally, the research highlighted that in the current economic climate, there is a great need to optimise existing solutions and generate as much value as possible from what is already in place.

Measuring performance is all well and good, but controlling performance and managing customers through accurate information is the best stance for successful service and business management. In this article Steve Downton discusses how many service operations are struggling to obtain data about their operation to measure success against Service Level Agreements (SLAs), let alone manage their operation by the use of accurate and timely information.

Customer Focus is key to the success of a business, but is a very broad term with many interpretations of “customer” and the specific “focus”. I would like to establish through this article the need to provide accurate measurements of the business performance in relation to an individual customer, so that the primary focus of the business is always on the customer. In addition I will discuss why such measurements are important and can provide a picture of the optimum interactions, which should add value to both the customer and the business.

You probably know the cost of failing an SLA, but do you know the true cost of achieving an SLA? This article will consider how hard it is today to manage a complex business through exception reporting and the need instead to have detailed measures that consider the real trade-offs.

Business managers often seem not to realise that what is measured determines the attitude and outlook of a business and that the fundamental purpose behind measuring performance is to influence behaviour, not generate paperwork. The focus should not be the production of reports, as most measurements provide a snapshot of what has passed.

There is now a positive trend amongst leading edge businesses to adopt measurement as a fundamental part of their strategy to effect change throughout the organisation.

The impact on a business of changing its measurement strategy can be dramatic, and will influence the whole ethos of the business and how it is run. This is easily seen if we compare the difference between measuring “Cash Flow”, “Revenue” or “Profitability”, when each different focus will drive a very different outcome. This is also true when the service operation has been set up as a cost center or profit center. One of the reasons for the notoriously low investment in service can be attributed to service operations being established as cost centers

A report released by Gartner's recruitment specialist, people says that IT staff will be expected to work 50% harder by 2005 as technology lifecycles speed up and companies struggle to fill gaps. With this will come the need for employers to look closely at staff retention as demand exceeds supply. This issue is already coming to a head judging by a recent article in the publication, "Computing", which reports on the conflict produced within a major company in the service industry in their drive for engineering productivity.