Welcome to the April edition of Manex ViewPoint, our quarterly e-newsletter.  Each issue provides a wealth of information on innovative solutions to maximize your business performance.

In This Issue:

We invite you to read our previous issues on our website at the following link.

Steps in Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is a coordinated and systematic process, establishing the overall future direction of your company to achieve the maximum potential in an ever-changing competitive environment. And while it may seem counter intuitive to think of embarking on such a process during a slower economy, now is the ideal time to undertake strategic planning initiatives. With operations stabilized to the extent necessary, the goal is not just try to survive, but instead take advantage of the time to plan a better future.

Creating a successful plan will ensure your company’s goals and objectives are appropriate, and that company resources, especially labor and capital, are properly focused toward achieving those goals and objectives. An effective strategic plan will answer the following questions:

1. Where do we want to be in the future?
2. Where is our organization today?
3. How should we focus our resources to get there?

Steps in Strategic Planning

1. Preparation. Your organization must determine if the time is right for a planning effort. If a management change is in the works or a budget crisis is looming, a strategic planning process might not be appropriate. Planning requires the full support and commitment of your company’s leadership. Without proper resources and time, the planning effort will not be successful. The following tasks must be completed in order to properly prepare the planning process:

• Identifying the specific issues that the planning process should address.
• Creating a planning committee.
• Developing an organization profile.
• Clarifying roles within the planning process.
• Developing a specific method or system for the planning process

The mission statement should describe the business your organization is in. It should define the purpose of your organization and what it seeks to accomplish. Finally, the mission statement should articulate the values and beliefs that guide your organization.

The vision statement is a blueprint for the planning process – an overall statement of what your organization seeks to accomplish as it looks toward the future. It should describe any unmet needs for your products or services, and how you will go about fulfilling those needs.

3. Situational Assessment. The planning committee must obtain current information regarding your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This information will highlight the critical success factors facing your organization, and what must be addressed within the strategic plan. The situational assessment involves the following two parts.

• Internal - defining and measuring labor/capital resources, equipment, training, financing options, etc.
  
• External - measuring the competitive landscape through a comparison of competitor resources, defining client and supplier relationships and how their needs are met, etc.

4. Developing Strategies, Goals and Objectives. The outcome of this step is the strategic direction, the long-term goals and specific objectives that will address your organization’s critical success factors. This step is the heart of the planning process and involves considerable discussion among planning committee members, management, and selected employees. The strategy defines the overall approach to be taken. The goals and objectives should involve definable and measurable outcomes. Equally important is a specific plan of action for achieving the goals and objectives.

5. Writing and Communicating the Plan. The finished plan should include outcomes from all of the previous steps. An introduction should include details about the planning committee and the methods used in the planning process. The mission and vision statements should be highlighted. The critical success factors should be described, along with details about the internal and competitive environments. Finally, the plan should include the overall goals and objectives and the specific approach that will be used to achieve them.

Once completed, the plan should be printed and distributed throughout your organization and highlighted through oral presentations and company meetings. Follow-up meetings should be held to maintain focus on the goals and objectives, along with appropriate training and education.

For more information on Manex’s Strategic Planning services, contact Jonathan Lee at jlee@manexconsulting.com.

Workforce Development as a Strategy to Emerge More Competitive From a Down Market Cycle
The headlines of a recession are becoming more commonplace. However, unlike previous down cycles,  where organizations indiscriminately slashed training budgets to cut costs, this time a few firms are seeing the market downturn as an opportunity to plan for the future, so that when demand increases, they are better positioned for success and stronger than their competitors.

Rather than cut training investments, Trane, the world leader in air conditioning systems and services, has changed the focus of its workforce development programs to ensure that the company maintains market share even during an economic downturn.

For example, over the past few years, the company has launched training programs to help its sales and marketing staff on the commercial side of the business sell services and products across Trane’s business lines, rather than focus on equipment sales.

“These skills become even more important in a down market,” says Lawrence Costello, senior vice president of HR. “In a down market, we are more reliant on selling and marketing skills, so if that means that some employees need to spend more time in training courses, then that’s what we will do.”

“The biggest mistake would be to stop all development activity in a down market.”

To learn more about Manex’s Workforce Development offerings, contact Sari Kelley at skelley@manexconsulting.com.

Getting the Most from Your Distributor Relationship
How can you be more than another listing on the distributor's price sheet? And how can you make sales success happen?

Trust is the single-most important success factor in channel relationships. You need to gain trust through your industry and product knowledge. You should be able to walk into any distribution company and ask to see a structured collection of what is known about any given market the company operates in. Get to know your distributor by asking the following questions:

• Who are the distributor's top customers/resellers? Why?
• How does the distributor promote to its customers? E-mails, newsletters, meetings?
• How much will a typical customer order? How often?
• What trade shows do you exhibit at?
• Why haven't you sold to company XYZ until now?
• Do you sell any products that can be sold in tandem with or parallel to ours?

Volunteer to make a few visits together with the distributor salesperson. You will gain valuable intelligence about the distributor's operations.

Both parties must profit from distributor/partner relationships (win-win). Work from a plan that you both agree on. The distribution plan should incorporate answers to the following questions:

• Who are the right buyers?
• How are we going to get the right buyers to focus on this product?
• What will their sales objections be?
• How will we overcome these objections?
• Who are our competitors in this market?
• What is our unique selling proposition in this market?
• How can we make the customer's life easier?
• Which publications in your region hold the most credibility with these customers?

Here are a few other suggestions to get the most from your distributor relationship:

• Introduce your product personally to the distributor's sales force. If the sale is technical, bring along a technical support person.
• Identify what you need from your distributor channel.
• Sales quotas invoke the defense mechanisms of the distributor and should be established only after a free-thinking discussion generates a distribution plan.
• Measure distributor performance to goals; what you inspect you can expect.
• Conduct confidential customer satisfaction surveys and share the results with your distributor.
• Create distributor advisory councils.

For more information on how Manex can help manage distributor relationships, contact Tim Dean tdean@manexconsulting.com.

What Makes Customer Satisfaction Research Useful?
*Through its content partnership with IndustryWeek (IW), Manex is pleased to provide an excerpt from this IW article directly to you.  More IW columns and articles can be found on Manex’s website.

Much has been written in the last couple of years about the promise of customer satisfaction research (CSR) to improve performance or shorten development cycles for businesses and organizations. This work is particularly germane in North America, where growth in many industrial and commercial markets is peaking and companies are scrambling for competitive advantage. The concept is simple: capture customer feedback and use the data to set business priorities.

Customer satisfaction data is routinely gathered to support continuous improvement programs like TQM, ISO and Six Sigma. The answers to the questions "How are we doing?" and "What should we do better?" are the building blocks of a customer relationship based on measurable value. Answered correctly, they track improvements in the business relationship and identify areas for improvement. However, translating the answers into meaningful actions is difficult.

The issue is not whether or not you are getting information about customer satisfaction; it is whether or not you are using information about customer satisfaction to act differently. Generally, two factors cause weak CSR: uninvolved stakeholders and useless data.

The full article can be found at the following link

Manex to Exhibit at Alliance West Small Business Procurement Fair, April 24th

Come visit us at booth #116.
Manex will exhibit at Alliance West 2008, the 5th Annual Small Business Procurement Fair, which includes one-on-one meetings, hands-on workshops, a trade show, and networking for hundreds of small businesses and local prime contractors.  The event returns to San Jose, CA, at Parkside Hall next to the San Jose Convention Center on April 24, 2008.

For more information and to register, please read more.

Bill Browne Joins Manex Team
Manex is pleased to announce the addition of Bill Browne, Engagement Manger, to its team. With more than 28 years of extensive manufacturing experience, Bill has proven expertise in general management, operations, quality systems, engineering and product development. He brings significant experience in domestic and international operations, including China, Hong Kong and the UK, spanning a wide range of industries, including high-tech, automotive, and consumer products.

Bill holds an MBA with high honors from the University of Detroit, and a BS in Engineering Arts – a combination of Engineering and General Business – from Michigan State University. Bill has also achieved his certification as an American Society for Quality (ASQ) Six Sigma Green Belt.