409 Posts Found

1. Are you able to break down your operating inventory into the three major categories when reporting levels—safety, replenishment and excess or obsolete stock?
2. Is your company using the most effective method to calculate your safety stock levels? Are you using statistical formulas that incorporate the accuracy of sales forecasts, required production lead times, manufacturing schedule adherence and service-level data for each SKU? Or are

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Authors: Francois Faelli, Pratap Mukharji, Raymond Tsang, Sam Israelit, Thierry Catfolis | Source: Inventory management: 10 questions to diagnose your inventory health | Subject: Operations Questions

What a company should ask itself

• Do we understand customer profitability at the transaction level (by product, customer, and channel)?
• Who really buys our product and why?
• Which customers would we fire? Which customers should we be doing our best to keep?
• Do we scientifically measure pricing choices made by customers?
• What drives our customer segmentation? How do we approach our customers differently?

What a company should ask customers

• Are

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Authors: George Stalk, Jr., Peter Stanger, Peter Wetenhall, Philippe Morel | Source: Pricing Myopia | Subject: Pricing

1. Why does your business exist?  This question reveals your true purpose.  It is the most powerful question, and all other questions revolve around this nucleus. Go beyond just products and profits in expressing your purpose.  What is your company’s unique value contribution to the world?
2. Which business are you really in?  This question implies a choice among alternatives.  Choosing wisely depends on the linkage

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Author: Norm Levy | Source: Want Better Answers? Try Better Questions | Subject: Miscellaneous Questions

1. Is the idea truly disruptive? Consider: Is the job BIG, as well as unsatisfied? Can we find a compelling foothold customer and solution to make progress? Can we start small and earn early profits? Can we avoid competition from large incumbents?
2. Can we find a way to implement with low fixed costs (to allow for iteration) and to pilot the concepts cheaply?
3. Are there long-term

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Authors: Brad Gambill, Scott D. Anthony | Source: One Hundred Days To Disruption | Subjects: Entrepreneurship Questions, Innovation Questions

CEOs should ask the following 20 questions to assess whether their organization is inflation ready in the three critical areas of pricing, procurement, and finance.

Pricing

• Do we have dedicated resources for pricing intelligence?
• Do we employ state-of-the-art pricing analytics?
• Do we have short- and long-term guidelines for price setting?
• Is inflation factored in to pricing decisions?
• Do we have real-time information on competitors’ prices?
• Do we continuously monitor customers’ price

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Authors: Daniel Stelter, Ulrich Pidun | Source: Making Your Company Inflation Ready | Subjects: Finance Questions, Pricing

Here are the three important questions to ask before you start planning that next customer survey:

1. What is the survey for?
   • To give a consistent year-on-year picture for performance management
   • To compare relative performance in specific areas across a competitive set
   • To understand what customers want; what they value; and how they decide “who to use” and “who to recommend” (not always the same).
2. Who are you

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Author: Martyn Drake | Source: Three Questions to Ask Before You Start Surveying Customers | Subject: Communications Questions

The following questions can serve as a starting point for those contemplating integration in the wake of a merger. If your leadership team can answer all nine questions concerning your next PMI transaction, that bodes well. If there are gaps in your company’s responses, or some grey areas, then the prospects for a successful PMI may well be reduced. And an abundance of blanks on … [ Read more ]

Authors: Freddy Strottmann, Johannes Gerds, Pakshalika Jayaprakash | Source: Post Merger Integration: Hard Data, Hard Truths | Subject: Mergers and Acquisitions Questions

Information

1. What happened? (Reporting)
2. What is happening now? (Alerts)
3. What will happen? (Extrapolation)

Insight

4. How and why did it happen? (Modeling, experimental design)
5. What’s the next best action? (Recommendation)
6. What’s the best/worst that can happen? (Prediction, optimization, simulation)

Authors: Elizabeth Craig, Jeanne G. Harris | Source: How to Turn Data into a Strategic Asset | Subject: Management Questions

A great MICRO manager asks questions like:

• What are the deadlines for a particular project?
• How do we measure progress (and are we making progress)?
• Is there sufficient feedback exchange?
• How do we promote more accountability within the team?

But how about the MACRO part of management? Beyond your day-to-day role as a manager, you must also consider each person’s career trajectory.

A great MACRO manager asks questions like:

• What

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Author: Scott Belsky | Source: The Secret to Great Macro Management | Subject: Management Questions

You need to group your questions under three very broad questions:

1. Does the partner have the skills and resources I need? It’s important to distinguish between the skills a partner possesses and what the JV needs to succeed. They may not be the same thing. You also need to make sure that your proposed partner has been reinvesting and upgrading its skills, and not

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Author: Paul W. Beamish | Source: The International Joint-Venture: A Discussion with Professor Paul W. Beamish | Subject: Partnerships / Alliances Questions

If you were to design a business model from scratch, you would have to make four decisions:

1. What are the boundaries of my business, both vertically (the degree of integration along the value chain) and horizontally (the width of the portfolio of products offered and markets served)?
2. What is the nature of the relationships between my business and parties outside the boundaries of my business,

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Authors: Henri de Bodinat, Herman Vantrappen, Michael Ungerath | Source: Bringing business models down to earth | Subject: Strategy Questions

Are you asking your prospects the wrong questions?  When most sales reps are developing a B2B sale, they limit questioning to generic issues like which products the prospect is currently using.  Here’s a better idea: ask questions that reveal if the prospect is truly qualified to buy and how the buying decision will be made.

Here are ten sample questions, adapted from material provided by Keith … [ Read more ]

Authors: Geoffrey James, Keith Rosen | Source: 10 Tough Questions to Ask Prospects | Subject: Sales Questions

1. Do you offer a clear message and value?
2. Have you established Trust & Credibility?
3. Have you answered all the main objections?
4. Have you addressed the emotional “ownership” of the sale?
5. Have you substantiated your claims?
6. Have you made the next steps clear?
7. Could you have said the same thing in a 1/3 of the words?

Author: Bryan Eisenberg | Source: Optimizing Website & Landing Page Copy – A 10 Step Process | Subjects: Marketing Questions, Sales Questions

• Can we quantify our supply of and demand for leaders, both now and in the future?
• How many positions are filled by external recruitment versus internal promotion?
• What’s the win-rate for “must have” recruits?
• How do our retention rates for top and mainstream talent compare with those of our competitors?
• What is the rate of retention of external hires versus internal promotions?
• What are the overall promotion rates by

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Authors: Alan Bird, Lori Flees, Paul DiPaola | Source: Kick-start your talent machine | Subject: Leadership Questions

1. What are the implications of our business strategy and our approach to value creation for our executive compensation system? What behaviors are we trying to motivate? Does the system support our strategy? Does it encourage our executives to act like owners?
2. Is the overall pay package appropriately balanced? Between fixed pay and variable pay? Between short-term-variable and long-term-variable pay? For each level of the

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Authors: Frank Plaschke, Gerry Hansell, Lars-Uwe Luther, Mathias Schatt | Source: Fixing What’s Wrong with Executive Compensation | Subjects: Corporate Governance Questions, Human Resources Questions

• Are your pricing policies well-defined, allowing for both control and flexibility?
• Are those policies aligned with strategies to grow revenue and profits?
• Are mechanisms in place to monitor pricing policy compliance over time to identify potential abuse?
• Do you have incentives in place to encourage pricing compliance and increase sales growth?
• Is there a process to handle pricing exceptions? Are they clearly defined?
• Are roles, responsibilities, and decision rights

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Authors: Ann Tansamrit, Donna Stella, Pushkin Pant, Sara Matlock, Shalin Shah | Source: The High Cost of Pricing | Subject: Pricing

• How well is your business model suited to globalization? In general, an e-commerce business needs to move bits (information flows), money (payment flows), and atoms (physical flows). Moving bits requires telecommunications infrastructure. Moving money requires payment infrastructure. And moving atoms requires physical infrastructure. The extent to which your business relies on these infrastructure elements determines the ease of transportability of your business model
• What foreign

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Authors: Mohanbir Sawhney, Sumant Mandal | Source: Go Global | Subject: International / Global Questions

• How many levels of security are there?
• Is access assigned by individual, by category, or both?
• How easy would it be for an unauthorized person to enter the system?
• If the system has modem capabilities, how do you prevent unauthorized access?
• Does the security system record failed attempts to access?
• Does it lock out a modem after a predetermined number of failed attempts?
• How are policy, customer, and transaction notes

… [ Read more ]

Author: Terry Sweeney | Source: Ask The Right Security Questions Before Choosing an ASP | Subject: IT Questions

1. Are we building the right set of market-driving capabilities? The right market-driving capabilities are those in which excellence yields a sustainable competitive advantage and allows the leaders to drive the market. Recognize that often it is as challenging to determine which core competencies the corporation must have as it is to develop and build them.
2. Are we delivering I.T. services at the right level of

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Authors: Charles V. Callahan, Joseph Nemec Jr. | Source: The CEO’s Information Technology Agenda: Seizing the Right Opportunities | Subject: IT Questions

To tailor the design of a best-in-class M&A function, companies should answer five critical questions:

1. What is the M&A function’s role in the company? Does it reactively support ad-hoc decisions or proactively shape corporate strategy?
2. What expected value and volume of deals do we need to realize in the next three to five years?
3. Do we want to concentrate expertise on the M&A team or spread it

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Anant Shivraj, Daniel Friedman, Daniel Kim, Jens Kengelbach, Maximilian Strauch | Source: Is Your M&A Organization Built to Win? | Subject: Mergers and Acquisitions Questions