Your Game Plan for Competitive Advantage in the New Normal

Even before the downturn, you scouted out ways to make your team more flexible and responsive to a rapidly changing marketplace. But now you're faced with the results of the recession: a New Normal, defined by intense market volatility that threatens long-term survival.

The good news: the playing field's been leveled, at least temporarily. Everyone had the wind knocked out of them. Now's the time to take control of the game and secure your competitive advantage.

You'll need a new game plan. One that strengthens your ability to anticipate and agilely react to market fluctuations, even as you learn to do more with less. A plan that balances your internal capabilities with external solutions and expertise. Preferably delivered with utmost flexibility, on-demand.

Your Finance Game Plan

An unpredictable global economy, flat top-line revenue, scarce credit, and increasing business risk and regulatory requirements are now the norm. Your competitive advantage depends on your ability to find new ways to manage cash flow, employ financial strategies that boost profitability while mitigating risk, and improve cost management across the enterprise.

Employ these strategies and resources to form the foundation of your winning game plan.

• Proactively manage cash flows (Learn More)
  
  If your top lines are flat or declining, you're not alone. And if you're going to put some distance between you and your competition, you'll need to focus some more on your expenses.
  
  You've likely eliminated wasteful discretionary spending and low-performing staff positions. Now take a closer look at your external spending on direct and indirect goods. There are opportunities to be had from collaborating with suppliers on discount and payment strategies.

  • 5 Factors Driving Today's Finance and AP Leaders

  
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• Boost profitability while mitigating risk (Learn More)
  The financial and operational stress your business is experiencing is no different for your suppliers and customers. To boost profitability, you'll need to find new customers and service them more cost effectively. Mitigate performance risk with better understanding about your exposure to supply chain risk, cash investment strategy risk, and employee fraud. In times like these, knowledge is a key competitive advantage.

  • Lessons Learned from the Recession: Supply Risk
  • Transform AP into Working Capital Heroes
  • Learn about how you can use Ariba Discovery to find new customers

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• Capture new operational savings (Learn More)
  Collaborating with suppliers in a cost effective way can identify hidden savings opportunities that strengthen both of you. Try extending your backend systems to integrate your suppliers. Collaborate with them virtually, instantly, and automatically on orders, order confirmations, invoices, payments, and more.

  • Leading Strategies in Cash Disbursements with Citi
  • High-Yield Working Capital in Today's Economy

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I'm ready to sideline the competition. Call me about implementing my game plan.

Your Procurement Game Plan

Supply volatility, capacity constraints, and global uncertainty are now the norm. Your competitive advantage depends on your ability to optimize operations and agilely respond to rapid market changes.

Employ these strategies and resources to form the foundation of your winning game plan.

• Expand your sourcing activity Learn more.
  Equip and train your team to look beyond frequently sourced categories. Explore more complex and elusive categories to identify new savings opportunities for both goods and services. Leverage a combination of technology, services, and category expertise to augment in-house knowledge. Follow this strategy to generate your next level of savings.

  • Sourcing Pipeline Building: Driving Effectiveness and Sustainability
  • AMR Research: Spend Visibility: Do You Have Corrective Lenses?
  • Lessons Learned from the Recession: Strategic Sourcing
  • Get quarterly category trend reports delivered to your inbox with SupplyWatch. Subscribe Now

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• Mitigate your risk Learn more.
  Some of your suppliers are likely stressed by this business environment. Which ones? It's time to find, repair, and strengthen the weakest links in your supply chain, or risk getting rained out. And with 83% of CPOs operating with no formal supply risk program, you have a real opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

  • Lessons Learned from the Recession: Supply Risk
  • Effective Supplier Performance Management: Maximize Your Profitability and Minimize Risks

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• Stop your savings leakage Learn more.
  The best players on the field move fast and make sure they get everything that's coming to them. Contract compliance is critical to catching all your negotiated savings. Automate your contract lifecycle management. Doing so can ensure fulfillment of all trading partner commitments, speed up collaboration, and develop more effective supplier relationships.

  • Lessons Learned from the Recession: Contract Management
  • AMR Research: CLM Landscape: Why Technologies Need to be Part of Your Supply Chain

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• Control processes and improve efficiencies Learn more.
  Negotiating better prices is only half of the savings equation. Without an adequate e-procurement process, you risk never realizing as much as 50% of your savings.
  
  Use an on-demand procurement technology to deliver more capacity and savings for goods and services. It's a performance enhancer that also lets you reassign critical resources to more strategic projects.

  • Procurement in the New Normal
  • 5 Strategies to Dramatically Accelerate Procurement Performance in 2010
  • Myths, Pitfalls, and Realities around Services Procurement

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• Access specialized skills and resources Learn more.
  Every so often, a team needs some specialized coaching or assistance. But not all the time. You want to dial it up or down as needed.
  
  Rely on external specialized support to bridge temporary capacity gaps in your resource pool, bandwidth, or expertise. Tap whatever you need – from brains to brawn – to augment your team or technology and avoid a drop in your industry's competitive standings.

  • Boost Pipeline using Effective Category Expertise and Knowledge Management

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I'm ready to sideline the competition. Call me about implementing my game plan.

Your Sales and Marketing Game Plan

Sales are slow. Orders minimized. Once-successful plays for new business are often blocked by moratoriums on new vendors. Budgets are constrained, including yours. Regardless, you're pressured to drive demand and incremental sales growth. You’re looking for ways to increase sales efficiency and improve the effectiveness of demand generation activities.

Employ these strategies and resources to form the foundation of your winning game plan.

• Do more with less Learn more.
  Improve efficiency by leveraging a fully optimized ecosystem where buyers in your target market regularly congregate to conduct business. Spend less with highly targeted marketing campaigns and reach a more qualified buyer pool – you'll make a bigger sales impact.

  • Five Real World eCommerce Tactics for Double-digit Revenue Growth
  • MarkMaster Video Testimonial

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• Rethink point of purchase Learn more.
  Connect with decision makers at the point of purchase. Support your customers' eProcurement initiatives and set up an eCommerce presence. Be responsive to their needs and get in front of prospective buyers when and where purchasing is convenient. You'll increase the likelihood of new sales, and boost your wallet share with existing customers in an area of spend they are not reducing: eProcurement.

  • MarkMaster Supplier Spotlight: eProcurement delivers larger market share at lower costs (PDF)
  • Telepress Customer Testimonial

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• Be in front of your buyer Learn more.
  Promote your business and connect with new buyers by leveraging a B2B eCommerce network that brings buyers and suppliers together. Leverage a range of online marketing opportunities to stay in front of a highly qualified buyer pool and increase your revenue growth opportunities.

  • Bishop Supplier Spotlight: Effectively targeting qualified and motivated buyers (PDF)
  • C & H Distributors Supplier Spotlight: Complementing direct marketing strategy to reach qualified buyers (PDF)

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• Level the playing field Learn more.
  Use an eCommerce network when competing against larger suppliers. Broaden your prospect pool and drive new revenue by delivering the same – or higher – levels of service, support, process automation, and integration traditionally provided by only the largest and most sophisticated suppliers.

  • Cellular for Less Supplier Spotlight: Upgrading eCommerce site to enhance competitive advantages (PDF)

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• Get closer (and closer) to your customer Learn more.
  The game has changed. It's no longer enough to be an approved vendor with just a product or service. Be a partner with a solution that delivers long-term value, scales and adapts to your customer's changing needs, and helps them improve their business. Showcase your skills and value through an eCommerce solution.

  • Telepress Supplier Spotlight: Growing sales and lowering costs to create a competitive edge (PDF)
  • Steelcase Supplier Spotlight: eBusiness integration leads to faster, more transparent processes (PDF)

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I'm ready to sideline the competition. Call me about implementing my game plan.

Your Accounts Payable Game Plan

Achieving your enterprise's competitive advantage is a team effort. In AP, opportunities to cut costs and improve efficiency lie in eliminating paper-based processes to handle inbound invoices. It's too costly to manually input invoice information; validate and match invoices with purchase orders; handle supplier inquiries and exceptions; and deal with blocked invoices from ERP systems. Process automation is the better way, offering as much as a 92% cost savings advantage.

Employ these strategies and resources to form the foundation of your winning game plan.

• Measure first to find the best opportunities for improvement Learn more.
  Technology alone isn't a silver bullet. Invest in automation where you'll see the greatest ROI. To understand where automation can deliver the greatest efficiency and effectiveness improvements, measure and compare your AP organization using third-party analyst benchmarks.

  • Aberdeen Report: E-Payables Benchmark Report: A/P Strategies for Success
  • Payables Performance Measurement

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• Eliminate paper Learn more.
  To get all of your invoices transmitted electronically and eliminate manual processing costs, encourage all of your suppliers to get onboard with your e-invoicing initiative. Scan and convert all paper invoices and related attachments. Both you and your suppliers will benefit from lower costs and greater efficiency.

  • PayStream Advisors: Your Passport to Paperfree Accounts Payable
  • Beyond Imaging: 5 Factors For Payables Automation Success

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• Go for Smart eInvoicing – not just automated processing Learn more.
  Invoice automation is only as good as the intelligence behind it. Use automated, "smart" technology to spot errors and route incorrect invoices back to suppliers before they are accrued on your end. Leverage collaborative, intelligent workflows to automate data entry, matching, and validation activities; eliminate supplier inquiries; and minimize exception handling.

  • Smart e-Invoicing: How Global Companies Achieve Touchless Invoicing
  • PayStream Advisors eInvoicing Adoption Report
  • Forrester Research Case Study: Global Pharmaceutical Company Cuts AP Cost-Per-Invoice by Half with Ariba

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• Give suppliers visibility into payment processes Learn more.
  Provide your suppliers with the means to check payment status and investigate blocked invoices themselves – eliminating the need to call your staff for payment status. Deploy self-service functionality for your suppliers and keep your AP team focused on more productive pursuits.

  • Best Practices in Supplier Enablement
  • Supplier success stories

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I'm ready to sideline the competition. Call me about implementing my game plan.

Your IT Game Plan

Now, and into the planning horizon, IT will struggle with limited resources and decreasing budgets. The new norm means spending each day juggling urgent requests to solve a myriad of internal business problems. You need to find ways to expand your capacity and impact while enabling all-important agility throughout the organization.

Fortunately, there's hope. Yours is the area that benefits the most from today's innovations, making you a star player in the enterprise-wide drive to gain competitive advantage.

Employ these strategies and resources to form the foundation of your winning game plan.

• Reduce operating expenses and costs Learn more.
  Switch to a SaaS platform to meet the demands of numerous internal departments. Collaborate with your internal procurement organization to negotiate your IT contracts, identify new suppliers, and enforce contract compliance. (Hide)
• Take care of the entire business Learn more.
  When you embrace the SaaS strategy, you'll have on-demand access to the latest cross-functional solutions. You can then support a range of business functions – human resources, finance, accounting, and travel and expenses, just to name a few – that may have been neglected by earlier, lengthy software installations. (Hide)
• Evaluate before upgrading Learn more.
  Keeping up with installed technology presents capital investment risk. If your current vendor is offering an upgrade, take a moment. Step back and ask users if the technology meets their needs. Before you put more money into a system, make sure it’s the right one. (Hide)
• Free isn't always free Learn more.
  The software might be free. But, is the implementation? Is customization? Before your team approves a "free" investment, make sure you know the true cost to your organization. (Hide)

Additional Coaching

• On-Demand Survival Guide
• IDC Report: Coping with the "New Normal" – How the Changed Economy is Shaping IT Practices

I'm ready to sideline the competition. Call me about implementing my game plan.