Companies prepared to gather multiple fragments of information about those who use their products and services in a bid to identify hidden patterns can add value for customers – and build an unrivalled market position.
To develop a sustainable competitive advantage, companies need to offer products and/or services that keep attracting customers. Focusing on operational excellence is one of the strategies companies can adopt in order to do so.
The GCB Berlin cases describe a strategic transformation process of a German bank. Over a period of 3 years, GCB Berlin has transformed into a customer-intimate financial institution. The management team of the company used Strategy Mapping, the Balanced Scorecard, and a new sales-and-service approach as transformation tools to get the entire organization more strategy-focused.
This case presents the approach taken by ING Belgium’s Marketing department to build operational and analytical competency with the ambition of playing a leading role in the strategic transformation of the business. Students are invited to evaluate the bank’s achievements up to the time this case was written and to discuss the issues and challenges facing this ambitious Marketing department.
Strategic alliances have become a common feature of supply chains, with managers of companies along the chain integrating their processes to enhance competitiveness. Yet research shows that alliances do not guarantee success – and little is known about why some strengthen the market position of the partners while others do not. Evelyne Vanpoucke and Ann Vereecke set out to understand which aspects of an alliance are more likely to deliver success. This article explores how behavioural features of an alliance – such as trust and commitment, and how partners communicate and manage the relationship – impact performance.
Environmental pioneers can still dominate markets reluctant to reward them. They may be eco-friendly, but clean tech companies confront hostile markets. In order to prevail, they will need to attract customers prepared to pay more for a green product, perform better than competitors, and change the rules of the game.
Private equity investors routinely get a bad press – but how justified are claims that the management buyouts (and buy-ins) they engineer give the green light to a series of predictable decisions that stamp out both the representation and interests of employees? For trade unions, the questions typically raised when private equity buyouts take place tend to focus on how fast, blatant or circuitous the transition, and rarely on whether damaging changes in industrial relations will actually be avoided.
A maintenance company whose staff provide day and night coverage for airlines on a complex flight schedule needs to keep its labour costs down without alienating unions yet remain flexible enough to cover for the unexpected. Time to call in an algorithm. This project, explained in the paper “Improving Workforce Scheduling of Aircraft Line Maintenance at Sabena Technics”, demonstrates the potential for optimization programming taking in diverse demand and supply variables to solve complex scheduling problems.
Championing a customer-intimate philosophy – so that business strategies are aligned with customers, individually and collectively – is a laudable goal. But customer intimacy is enhanced when companies take steps to ensure that their people don’t just ‘talk the talk’ but also ‘walk the walk’.
Financial capital is one of the key resources a business requires to support its growth. Although few in number, high growth businesses contribute disproportionately to employment and wealth creation in an economy. As a result it is important to know, not only how high-growth businesses fund growth, but the reasons behind this choice. This article zooms in on new research from Belgium looked at a sample of more than 32,700 companies over an 8 year period and investigated how those with the highest growth supported the expansion financially.