Английский язык. Практический курс для решения бизнес-задач. Нина Пусенкова

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      How can companies avoid this situation? By adding a metric that summarizes customer profitability.

      Consider the situation faced in the 1990s by one of the nation’s largest distributors of medical and surgical supplies. In five years, sales had more than tripled to nearly $3 billion, yet selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses, thought by many to be a fixed cost, had increased even faster than sales; margins had declined by one percentage point and the company had just incurred its first loss in decades.

      The experience of this company is hardly unique. Companies often capture additional business by offering more services. The list is wide-ranging: product or service customization; small order quantities; special packaging; expedited and JIT delivery; substantial pre-sales support, etc. While all of these services create value and loyalty among customers, none of them come for free. For a differentiated customer intimacy strategy to succeed, the value created by the differentiation has to exceed the cost of creating and delivering customized features and services.

      Unfortunately, many companies cannot accurately decompose their aggregate marketing, technical, service, and administrative costs into the cost of serving individual customers. Either they treat all such costs as fixed-period costs and don’t drive them to the customer level, or they use inaccurate methods, such as allocating a flat percentage of sales revenue to each customer to cover indirect «below-the-line» expenses.

      The remedy to this situation is to apply activity-based costing (ABC) to accurately assign an organization’s indirect expenses to customers. Many companies, however, have tried ABC at some time during the past twenty years and abandoned it because it did not capture the complexity of their operations, took too long to implement, and was too expensive to build and maintain. Fortunately, a new approach is now available that is far simpler and much more powerful than traditional ABC.

      «Time-driven» ABC requires obtaining information on two parameters: the cost per hour of each group of resources performing work; and the unit times spent on these resources by specific activities for products, services, and customers. For example, if a customer support department has a cost of $70 per hour, and a particular transaction for a customer takes 24 minutes (0.4 hours), the cost of this transaction for this customer is $28. The end result is the ability to measure individual customer profitability accurately and in a system that is easy to implement and inexpensive to maintain and update.

      The Payoff: BSC Customer Profitability Metrics

      The ability to measure profitability at the individual customer level allows companies to consider new customer profitability metrics such as «percentage of unprofitable customers.» Such customer profitability measures provide a valuable signal that satisfaction, retention, and growth in customer relationships are desirable only if these relationships contribute to higher, not lower, profits.

      BSC customer profitability metrics are also highly actionable. If a company finds that an important customer is unprofitable, it should first look internally to see how it can improve its internal processes to lower the cost-to-serve. After all, we can’t expect customers to pay for our inefficiencies. For example, if important customers are migrating to smaller order sizes, the company can focus on reducing setup and order handling costs. The company can ask the customer to use electronic channels, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and the Internet, that greatly lower the cost of processing large quantities of small customer orders.

      Customized pricing policies should be at the heart of any strategy to manage customer profitability. The company can set a base price for a standard product or service, with standard packaging, delivery, and payment. The company also provides customers with a menu of options representing variations from the standard order, such as a customized product or service, special packaging, expedited delivery, or extended credit terms. Each menu item has a price that at least covers its cost, as measured by the ABC model, so the company no longer suffers losses from offering customized services. The menu prices also motivate customers to shift their purchasing and delivery patterns in ways that lower total costs to the benefit of the company and its customers.

      Scorecard measures of the incidence of unprofitable customers and the magnitude of losses from unprofitable relationships focus the organization on managing customers for profits, not just for sales – thus making the customer focus align with financial objectives.

      Source: Robert S. Kaplan, Balanced Scorecard Report,

      August 25, 2005. http://hbswk.hbs.edu

      Essential Vocabulary

      1.property, plant and equipment (PPE) – основные средства

      2. financial accounting system – система финансового учета

      3. embed v – вставлять, укреплять; врезаться, укладывать; внедрять

      4. balanced scorecard – сбалансированная система показателей

      5. perspective n – перспектива, вид, вид на будущее; угол зрения

      6. outcome n – результат, последствие, исход, выход

      7. Total Quality Management (TQM) – система тотального управления качеством

      8.throughput n – пропускная способность, производительность

      9. operating income – операционная прибыль

      10. return on capital employed (ROCE) – доходность примененного капитала

      11. economic value added (EVA) – экономическая добавленная ценность

      12. zero defects – бездефектный

      13. shield n – щит (напр. налоговый), защита

      shield v – защищать, прикрывать, спасать, отвратить

      14. cascade n – каскад

      cascade v – спускать вниз по принципу каскада

      15. track n – след, остаток, признак; образ жизни; тропа, цепь, ряд; выслеживание, преследование, отслеживание

      tracking n – слежение, отслеживание

      track v – следить, выслеживать, оставлять следы, прокладывать путь

      16. СКАЧАТЬ