Improved Execution

In our opinion there is no doubt that slick IT systems improve business execution. Consider the following story re the UK grocery market.

For much of the twentieth century Sainsbury's was the market leader in the UK supermarket sector. However in 1995 it lost its place as the UK's largest grocer to Tesco and in 2003 was pushed into third position by Asda. Until around 2000 Sainsburys with its fiercely loyal customer base managed to retain its market share of around 20% but then it suffered a precipitous drop to around 15-16% in less than 2 years. Currently (2006) Sainsburys' size in the UK is less than half of Tesco's.

It is generally accepted that during the time of this catastrophic market share drop that Sainsburys had major problems with its Supply Chain Management systems, culminating in its first ever reported loss in 2004. Even the most loyal customers will desert a supermarket, if the shelves are bare!

Tesco are a phenomenal company and there are many reasons contributing to their success. It is, however, generally accepted that Tesco does an excellent job of implementing valuable technologies as they become available and of managing their IT Systems - for example, their very successful Tesco Clubcard took advantage of data-warehousing and data-mining technologies and their web-site is the most successful grocery web-retailer site in the whole world. They are not necessarily bleeding edge, but they are pragmatic and use the technology as soon as it can add real business value. They are already doing pilot studies with RFID tags, currently they cost 3p each; when the price drops to say 0.5p, which supermarket company do you think will be first to add them to all of their items? Initially this will provide huge competitive advantage, then it will just be required to survive. Imagine a national retailer now not using barcodes! It would be impossible for them to survive.

In 2000 Sainsburys outsourced much of their IT systems to Accenture to try and save money - indicating that at that time they did not view IT as core to their business model. In hindsight and correlating this with the results you do not have to be a genius to see that this was a huge mistake. Hence, in 2004 they brought much of their IT back in house and had to pay £553 million to do this, even after suffering huge losses resulting from empty shelves. Tesco in comparison have always viewed IT as absolutely core to their business model.

Like Tesco we can help you to pragmatically take advantage of valuable new technologies as they emerge, fortunately (for smaller companies than Tesco) the combination of Moors law (cheap powerful computer chips) and Microsoft's policy of huge R&D spread over very high volumes means that these powerful software technologies are available to companies of all shapes and sizes (in fact many of Tesco's systems are based on new Microsoft technologies, such as SQL Server 2005 and .NET.)

The type of business management systems we deploy will help you to better execute resulting in:

• More high value activity performed
• More opportunities created
• More conversions to sales
• More service cases resolved, more quickly
• More accuracy, higher quality
• More projects delivered on time
• More product delivered
• More efficiency, less waste, lower costs
• More visibility, more control, better compliance.