How Financial Services Can Use Sales & Operations Planning

Lessons from the Shop Floor: Applying Sales & Operations Planning to Financial Services
By Muir Sanderson, Piyush Doshi, and Christine Korwin-Szymanowska
This PDF from Booz Allen Hamilton examines on way that manufacturers, who face relentless pressure on margins, are constantly looking for new ways to improve the bottom line. 

This successful approach focuses on interdepartmental coordination. Called sales and operations planning (S&OP), this method helps business units strike the right balance when competing for the same resources. With just a few tweaks to the way S&OP is applied in the manufacturing business, Booz Allen Hamilton demonstrates how it could prove just as useful for financial services companies that also have business units competing for the same resources.

Included are five questions to see if this approach is right for you.l

Martha Stewart: A Study in Bouncing Back

Securities regulators may have stripped Martha Stewart of the chairman and CEO title and denied her a seat on her own board–something that pains her to this day–but Stewart continues to dream big and work hard.

This portrait from BusinessWeek.com shows Stewart hasn’t been sitting still — she’s helped design new homes, forged a slew of merchandise deals, completed a 750-page book, launched her 24-hour radio channel, hosts a daily live TV show, is helping to create a search engine of Martha-approved sites, and  developing a line of food.

Martha Stewart without Martha? In the interview, she will only express the hope that her name will have the longevity of Coco Chanel’s or Walt Disney’s. So why do we keep hearing “Betty Crocker” lately…?

CFOs Strapped for Time

Not surprisingly, a new survey from Robert Half Management Resources finds that 46 percent of finance executives say that time management is the greatest challenge for them today, up from 36 percent five years ago.

Keeping pace with technology ranked second, with 22 percent of the response, versus 27 percent in 2001. 

Read the related article from CFO.com

Connecting Advertisers and Customers

Oversee bills itself as technology-driven media, making the most of search-engine optimization to connect advertisers to customers.

For example, among the Los Angeles-based company’s websites is one called Low.com. If a potential borrower enters the word “mortgage” or “home refinance” on Google or one of the other search engines, the borrower might be directed to Low.com. If the borrower then brings up Low.com’s Web page and clicks for a loan application from a lender, that lender will pay a fee to Oversee for bringing in that customer.

The size of the fee depends on how much business the referred borrower does with the lender. But Oversee’s annual revenue is now running at more than $100 million.

Read the story from The New York Times.

New Jobs Site

Blue Chip Expert focuses on free agents, the roughly 12 million contract workers in the United States.  Its creator Scott Langmack wants a lock on the high end – software engineers, creative directors, consultants.”The cream of the workforce never posts resumes on the big job boards,” Langmack says, which is why companies have a hard time finding them.  The site is accessed by invitation only, but once you create a Blue Chip profile outlining your skills for hire, you can invite friends to the site. If one gets hired for a project, you’ll be rewarded with a cut of her project fee. A $200,000 gig, for instance, would net you $4,000.

Read the article from CNNMoney.com

Size Matters — Especially When You Can’t Measure It

Advertising online this year is expected to grow 33% this year, to $16 billion. But what are advertisers seeing for that money? And how are they deciding where that $16 billion should go?

Excellent questions, and some day the web will have the answers figured out. But not yet. BusinessWeek tackles the thorny subject of web metrics. When’s a page view not a page view? When it’s built in Ajax.  In this ADD-world, are we going to time spent in a site is suitable?

This article neatly outlines the existing measuring tools, their pros, cons and, just maybe, where it will end up next.

Getting On The Board

Two recent articles pointing out the shortage of qualified candidates for board membership offer fresh perspectives for the ranks of directors.

No longer recruited from golf clubs and old-boy networks, today’s director has to be qualified. As Joan Warner points out in Directorship, “Since firing a director who doesn’t work out is difficult at best, each decision is critical. The casual process has collapsed.”

At Forbes.com, author Jim Drury reiterates the importance of having CEOs sit on boards.

…active CEOs play an important role on corporate boards–as long as they’re sitting on one or two at a time, rather than eight or nine. First, they are independent directors, which means they aren’t employees, don’t have a stake in the company and therefore can give conflict-free advice. And other board members highly value their advice. When we survey board members about how they view their fellow directors, active CEOs consistently rank near the top of the charts.

Although CEOs are the ideal candidates, they’re also the busiest and most scrutinized executives these days. As Warner says, other attractive candidates can be found among active CFOs and the retired managing partners of the big accounting firms as well as among women and minorities.

Who’s Calling Who a Spammer

Iin the last quarter of 2005, 203 billion e-mail messages were filtered and prevented from being delivered — obviously not counting the junk that did get through to you inbox.

But as more companies use e-mail in place of snail-mail marketing pieces, just who is and who isn’t a spammer can be an important question.

According to the New York Times, the Spamhaus Project, which has battled computer viruses along with an online attack last month that shut down its website, is now confronting an American marketer who is complaining that the organization exacts a vigilante style of online justice carried out by anonymous, unaccountable volunteers.

In the United States, the Can-Spam Act of 2003 permits bulk e-mailing as long as messages are marked as advertising and include a way for the recipient to decline them. (Here’s a link to the exact wording of Can-Spam.)

Read the full story in the Times.