Daily News Online

DateLine Thursday, 21 June 2007

News Bar »

News: BIA night flights from July ...           Political: A major political victory for Government ...          Financial: Strong capital market - a must for infrastructure growth - Executive Director Ernst & Young Malaysia  ...           Sports: Herath troubles Bangladesh  ....

Home

 | SHARE MARKET  | EXCHANGE RATE  | TRADING  | PICTURE GALLERY  | ARCHIVES | 

dailynews
 ONLINE


OTHER PUBLICATIONS


OTHER LINKS

Marriage Proposals
Classified
Government Gazette

Execution is the key for growth in asia, says CIMA’S keynote speaker

GROWTH: The key challenge for organisations in Asia is not achieving top line growth but achieving profitable growth according to Simon J Littlewood, the President of Asia Now (the Lean Growth Group) and the keynote speaker at the CIMA Business Leaders’ Summit 2007.

Littlewood, a recognised authority on Asian markets, also stated that CFOs have a crucial role to play in increasing sales productivity. Littlewood has 25 years’ experience in consulting and research, mainly in Asia, and is the architect of Lean Growth which uses proprietary research and change management tools to enable leading multinational companies to enter emerging markets and optimise profitable growth.

He drew on this experience during his technical paper presentation ‘From good to great: the CFO as champion of change’ on the second day of the Business Leaders’ Summit.

The paper underlined the need for CFOs to transform their teams from the traditionally less value adding transaction support functions to value adding business partners which can better support their organisation’s transformation from good to great.

He cited his ‘Lean Growth’ model to illustrate that for many organisations while sales often met expectations, just as often profits fell short. Littlewood believes that the CFO, with their particular blend of skills, can play a crucial role in improving profitability by positioning ‘growth enablement’ as an effort to reduce non-value added sales activity.

At the heart of Littlewood’s model is a rigorous planning and management methodology to improve sales productivity and focus on high value customer segments.

The key to this, Littlewood believes, lies in understanding where your future profit will come from and aligning your business to capture it, while instilling a culture of management and planning discipline and continuous improvement to ensure that sales targets are met.

This involves analysis of your customer base and segmenting sales and service activities accordingly, which will both free up sales time and allow it to be used to best effect, aligning channels and partners, optimising inventory and reducing receivables accordingly. This will then facilitate growing revenues and margins, reduce overall cost to serve and optimise working capital.

Disciplined planning and review is imperative. When planning and forecasting Littlewood cautions strongly against the unscientific, but all too prevalent ‘last year plus 10%’ model. Instead, he advises that organisations focus on activity based analysis and consider future value when evaluating customers, regularly reviewing your market for changes and clearly identifying low-earning or marginal business.

The first step, he suggests, is to ensure that your sales function is aligned to customer value.

In many organisations, executives tend to overestimate the amount of time their sales force spend on sales, and underestimate how much time they spend on administration which has a direct negative impact on sales productivity. The administration and support function, Littlewood states, could be effectively be undertaken by well trained customer service staff.

Financial fulfilment performance is also a major sales enabler. Once the sales force has been realigned, it is important that service delivery functions such as finance and logistics are streamlined and have a culture of continuous improvement which ensures optimum service and cost efficiency.

Littlewood also recognises that productivity programmes, which necessarily involve changes in often embedded working practices, often have a high rate of failure.

To avoid failure a structured implementation plan and disciplined change management process is crucial. Management attention should be focused on prioritised high value initiatives, risks must be identified, classified and mitigated and management should ensure that all resources identified as being necessary within the plan are available. Littlewood also suggests that organisations should not try to undertake too many initiatives.

Once again, the role of the CFO is critical to success. To enable such change the CFO has to have be proactive and positive and have the leadership skills to optimise the skills of this in a new, value adding role of business partners while building trust in the business partner concept throughout his organisation.

The CFO also has a very important role in determining investments, to ensure that all investment decisions are considered objectively and that they fit the organisation’s profile and focus.

Littlewood is a graduate of New College, Oxford. After working for Merrill Lynch in the City of London, he held senior positions in Asia with A T Kearney and Accenture before founding Asia Now, the leading Singapore-based advisory group, in 1998.

He has 25 years’ experience in consulting and research, mainly in Asia, and is the architect of Lean Growth which uses proprietary research and change management tools to enable leading multinational companies to enter emerging markets and optimise profitable growth.

He also advises the Economist Business Network, contributes monthly columns to Asia Finance and Banking and the Singapore Business Review and comments on Asia for BBC TV and radio.

 

EMAIL |   PRINTABLE VIEW | FEEDBACK

Gamin Gamata - Presidential Community & Welfare Service
www.srilankans.com
www.greenfieldlanka.com
www.wallauwa.arpicohomes.com
www.cf.lk/hedgescourt
www.buyabans.com
www.news.lk
www.defence.lk
www.helpheroes.lk/
www.peaceinsrilanka.org
www.army.lk

| News | Editorial | Financial | Features | Political | Security | Sport | World | Letters | Obituaries | News Feed |

Produced by Lake House Copyright © 2006 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.

Comments and suggestions to : Web Editor