Consolidating e-Business Benefits

At this stage we have a good understanding of

• the customer types - and individual customers - that are important to us
• what it is they do in their business
• the capabilities they expect us to provide to help them run their business more effectively
• the benefits - and the relative magnitude of those benefits - that we expect to achieve by providing those capabilities

We now need to consolidate this information to determine what it is we should do "on Monday morning" and how to prioritise our planned activities.

Let's start with the list of the customer types and the individual customers we might have analysed, as in this sample

It's a simple enough task to count the various benefits that we've already identified for each customer type and customer. The result might look something like this:

There are some comments that need to made about this diagram:
Firstly, the consideration of a particular customer type (say OEM) is separate from the individual customers who may belong to that type (Best OEM, Another OEM etc.) Hence, the count of benefits at Type level is not the sum or average of the individual counts.
Secondly, while increasing Customer numbers can apply as a benefit to a customer type, it does not make sense when applied to individual customers. There's only one Strategic OEM Inc., and no amount of e-Business functionality can clone that particular customer!
Thirdly,  I'm using Excel's conditional formatting, to visually highlight the maximum value in each column.

Presumably your business is like most others: In line with the 80:20 rule, some customer types - or individual customers - are more important than others. We can apply weightings accordingly, to reflect their importance to the business. Similarly, you might like to apply weightings to the individual benefits. For instance, you might consider cost savings to be really important - if only because they go directly to the bottom line, or new customers to be more valuable than orders. We can extend the model to reflect these niceities and calculate Weighted Benefits as shown below (Benefit_Count*Customer(Type)_Weighting*Benefit_Weighting)

Our consolidation process gives us the following table (click for a larger image, if you want to see the detail - I just want to talk about the trends that can be identified)

In our sample consolidation - and remember that this is just a sample, we can identify some strong messages:

• The most opportunity for realising benefit - on a simple count as well as on weighted values - is coming from providing capabilities that increase order numbers and order value
• Our Project Partners - both as a group and as individual, named customers - seem to be emerging as the sort of customer where we might gain the most leverage by addressing their capability requirements
• In particular, we need to decide how we're going to look after the customer Exciting Projects Inc.
• It might be well worth our while thinking about how we might support winning new customers of the type End User.

But business benefits (unfortunately) just don't appear out of thin air - we need to do something to make them happen. It's time to start defining projects!

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