Analysis / Intervention / Improvement
- Are reporting systems in place to measure against business plan and budgets / KPIs?
- Does the business produce meaningful monthly management reports?
- Can you quickly identify if and why an area is off plan?
Understanding what is going on in the business is critical. Information is key!
Would your business benefit from improvement in these areas:
- Long term planning and organisational structure.
- Return on investment.
- Profitability.
- Cash flow.
- Sales Force Effectiveness.
- Delivery performance.
- Staff retention
- Customer service.
Or perhaps something more specific to your business?
Relevant experience:
As Commercial Manager managing Finance at Scott, one of my key responsibilities was to produce a monthly Variation Analysis to a tight deadline.
This identified progress against annual plan and budgets on key variances and supplied to EMA office and Worldwide HQ.
Invaluable as it identified why manufacturing costs were up, sales of a particular brand down or marketing expenses exceeded, enabling action to be taken quickly when needed.
This also formed the base for Business Improvement and helped deliver a 59% (£2M) earnings improvement by:
- Working with Marketing, Sales and Manufacturing to reduce certain product sizes without detrimental effect but with straight bottom line impact.
- Looking carefully at Sales travel costs and tightening budgets
- Challenged volume selling which reduced margin with no overall volume gain.
- Cost/benefit analysis working with department heads applied to all spends.
- Clear communication of budgets and regular performance updates.