The Role of Market Research in US and Canadian Business Growth

Do you know how to whittle? Whittling is an old skill that isn't used as much as it used to be because too much force can remove too much wood. That shape you were trying to make—maybe it's a bird? Blown up. If you cut too carefully, though, that bird will stay stuck in the woods.

Balance is the key to mastering this art. You need to find the balance and the bird

A global bulk distributor's strategic leadership team knew how to find balance when they were under pressure to set a growth plan for the next ten years and deal with shrinking profit margins. They had to achieve cost savings, time and process efficiencies, because their growth depended on it. They had to be brave and think in ways that would change things. To move too quickly, though, would put the business at too great of a risk. One more time. Maintain balance.

This problem was made worse by an old shared service model, a lack of process standardization that made doing work less efficient, and activity fragmentation across functions and locations that made it less efficient for people in different jobs. All of these problems had to be thought through and planned for in the strategic plan before the company could start to grow. A difficult task. The group went to Deloitte and its Restructuring Services for help.

THE SOLUTION

The job that Deloitte was given was clear: they had to look at the whole business and help find ways to save money, make processes more consistent, and make changes to the way things were run. This was called a "full-service delivery model assessment of the company." There were many things to look at. What tasks could be moved to places that cost less? What if tasks and roles that were decentralized were also spread out? How many resources were doing the same work in different places? Could routine tasks be done by machines to cut down on the horrible long hours and give workers more time to work on important projects? It was, of course, hard to make the plan to answer these questions and then the road map to change. Plus, this company had been around for a long time, and many of the teams, workers, and leaders had been there for 20 years or more.

The change that was being thought about was historic

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In what way do I begin? To learn more about role fragmentation and decentralization of activity, the Deloitte team did more than 40 sub-functional interviews across nine functions. They also surveyed 1,900 positions and led multiple functional operating model design discussions to get to the business case and implementation roadmaps for the client to work with and then put into action. The Deloitte IndustryAdvantageTM framework was used as part of this work to give the client the full range of ideas, knowledge, and technology from across Deloitte and our ecosystems. As an example, the use of advanced tools, methods, and research, such as Deloitte subject-matter experts' insights into the competitive market, best practices, and benchmarks, as well as research into the future of the workplace.

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The work that went into this analysis led to the understanding that there was no one right way to make things better. To help reach the big goal, the team looked into many possible outcomes, or ways that the needed changes could be made, using various tools that could be utilized at various times. These included various mixes of bigger, more significant changes and smaller, more gradual steps that could be taken to attain the same outcome. These included both back-office and front-office cases that dealt with the need for standardized and automated solutions head-on and brought the whole leadership team together.

HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS SAVED AND MORE TIME FOR EMPLOYEES TO USE FOR STRATEGY—A win-win situation.

What It Meant

The company is now on its way to getting between $20 million and $30 million a year in gross recurring gains from this work in both the front and back offices. The future-state service delivery model includes plans for these saves as well as ways to get more people to use shared services, automate tasks, send work overseas, and make work more uniform.

The business is now in the action phase, where steps are being taken right away to save a lot of money in the near future

The changes, such as aggressively automating repetitive tasks and delivering services at the right price, have also given employees more time to work on more strategic tasks, like focusing on a major digitization project that is already underway, role specialization efforts, and activities that help them grow and develop.

In the activation phase, the business got a detailed road map with a list of the most important things that need to be done to save money and make business processes more efficient in both the front and back offices. This lets the business standardize and automate business processes where it already has the skills to do so. The change impacts study helped the company learn more about how the implementation would impact its business besides just saving money.

The company wants to make this first part of activation cover the whole transformation journey in the future. They plan to do this by including more functions and business units and putting many of the suggested changes into action across the whole company.