Leading Industry Analyst and NetSuite Customer, Collaborative Consulting to Share Insights and Best Practices on How Services Organisations Can Avoid the 'Empty Ritual' of Business Planning
SAN MATEO, Calif.—August 22, 2013—NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced a webinar that will show professional services organisations how they can turn annual planning into a highly productive exercise that charts a course to greater profitability and serves as a catalyst for growth scheduled for Wednesday, August 28. The webinar, "Five Steps to Successful 2014 Business Planning," will feature Jeanne Urich, Managing Director of Service Performance Insight, a leading professional services research and consulting firm, and Richard Curzi, Vice President of Operations at Collaborative Consulting, a Burlington, Mass.-based IT and management consulting firm that has used NetSuite's cloud-based services resource planning (SRP) for more than nine years for project management, resource optimisation, time and expenses, financial reporting and strategic direction. To learn more about the webinar and to register, please click here.
Annual planning at many professional services organisations has become an empty ritual as firms often waste too much time and energy reliving past failures instead of exploring new avenues for growth. For both standalone firms and services teams embedded within larger organisations, common issues that undermine business planning include an unclear strategy, organisational silos, skills imbalance, immature processes, poor quality and below target financial performance. Drawing in part on Service Performance Insight's annual industry benchmark study of professional services organisations, Urich will share how organisations should draw on both quantitative and qualitative information in annual planning, and outline five key steps towards making annual planning a productive exercise including:
Build a shared vision of success. Service Performance Insight's Service Planning Pyramid has a vision statement at the top, supported by mission statement, values and culture, charter and business model.
Assess organisational strengths and weaknesses. A SWOT analysis guides the services organisation in identifying positives and negatives inside the organisation (strengths and weaknesses) and external to it (opportunities and threats).
Expose key themes and disconnects. This step is essential to ensuring alignment across the organisation, especially for embedded organisations answering to corporate leaders, and in resolving conflict and finding a balance between profit and customer satisfaction.
Confront reality. Firms need to assess both objective (quantitative) performance against defined goals and industry benchmarks; and subjective (qualitative) measures, and blend the two into a blueprint for lasting change.
Build initiatives. Building on planning, organisations should be poised to take action with realistic success metrics and clear roles, responsibilities and timeliness around three to five key annual initiatives.
"If done right, business planning can open up fresh new ideas and facilitate playing to strengths rather than shoring up weaknesses," said Urich. "The best of the best PSOs each year find new and better ways to do the things they love to do and are especially good at it, while minimizing the hassles and tedium of doing the things that hold them back or waste precious time and resources."
Serving clients across the United States and across multiple industries with a focus on business enablement, information management, technology enablement, and program management, Collaborative Consulting uses information from NetSuite SRP to support its planning process by examining historical trends and metrics such as headcount growth, utilisation, average billing rate, and average direct and indirect costs.
Curzi will share how Collaborative Consulting uses NetSuite SRP to develop its annual business plan and five-year strategy to model the coming year, setting revenue and profit goals, and monthly scorecard targets.
"Systematic yet flexible annual planning is fundamental to Collaborative Consulting and a significant reason behind our strong year-over-year growth," said Curzi. "Service Performance Insight's approach to business planning is a sound and proven strategy that can help organisations avoid pitfalls and improve their performance."
About NetSuite
Today, more than 16,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-class cloud financials/ERP suites for divisions of large enterprises and mid-sized organisations seeking to upgrade their antiquated client/server ERP systems. NetSuite excels at streamlining business operations as demonstrated in a recent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing financial management software vendor on a global basis. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud ERP/financials suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud is accelerating.
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