Get the info
One way to better understand the cost of your business is to utilize your information-gathering and research tools. By having focused research to use in your company’s strategic planning, you’ll know where resources are most needed for your business to become faster, more nimble and more cost-effective, whether that’s in setting up new operations or proactively adjusting value points with spending to meet changing customer needs.
Before you decide how to allocate your company’s physical and financial resources, you have to make sure information about your customers, industry, competitors and so on, is collected and evaluated similarly throughout your organization. In Diebold’s case, Swidarski added paperwork for all of his global market managers to analyze industry activity in detail.
“What we tried to put in place was a similar process that we could use across the board in terms of the evaluation,” he says. “Then we put it incumbent upon each of the country managers to fill out the documents and forms. At first, people looked at is as, ‘I’m filling out documents and forms.’… Now they understand that to get the R&D effort that we need for a place like Thailand, we need to know the specifics and granularity of the competitive landscape there and how that differs from Brazil, because they are different competitors. To get a group of diverse people across 90 countries focused on the priorities, everybody has to understand the endpoint. So collecting that information became very important.”
Implementing new information-gathering procedures in your business is sometimes necessary to ensure you have all the knowledge needed to make financial decisions.
For example, Swidarski recognized that Diebold could better plan for global operations by moving its $70 million per year R&D — previously based in the United States — out to its top revenue-generating countries and develop micro-market plans to map out each market’s strategy.
“In those micro-market plans, we know exactly what gaps we have, what technology from a software-hardware service standpoint and what we need to do to create competitive advantage,” Swidarski says. “Those countries — they drive about 80 percent of our total revenue — so [there is] very focused effort there.”
Having focused research for specific markets also helps Diebold identify which markets need new capabilities and which could be served by the company’s existing technology.
“Other countries may fall out that are going to use the technology we develop for a China or a Brazil or a United States or a France,” Swidarski says. “So though we may not develop something specific for a smaller country in Europe, we still have the technology that we developed that may be specialized for France that we can use there. That helps us hone our resources not only on the front end but on the back end.”
