In particular, during a recession period it is critical that organisations are able to become more agile by adopting their market positioning and their business strategy to the speed and nature of market changes. By doing so, they become capable of identifying and developing the organisational capabilities that will enable them to get stronger out of the recession.

Our research shows that successful organisations that have demonstrated capability to not only survive recessions but also benefit from them, focus on creating conditions that keep that the organisation is “awake” and “agile” and prevent from “periods of calm water” and “lethargy”.

They achieve that by undertaking four key steps:

Understanding changing market reality: Proactively monitoring the market and establishing a pragmatic understanding about the speed of market change and the nature of change the market is undergoing.

Re-defining their business strategy: Re-setting priorities to face the changing market reality and formulating strategies, business and operating plans that will enable the organisation to link its short term priorities to its mid and long term strategy.

Developing the “right” planning plaform: Building a planning platform that aligns market reality and strategy execution, enabling the organisation to implements its priorities in a disciplined and focused way.

Re-defining required organisational capabilities: Establishing a clear picture of the gap between the required and available organisational capacities by re-defining on what capabilities needs the organisation to focus and what it needs to lose.

Our research shows that all four steps are of equal importance, however, most organisations find extremely challenging develop the right planning platform and in many case fail to successfully execute their strategy and respond to the market reality.

This happens mainly because organisations have to choose among a variety of planning platforms and very often select the one that is not “fit for purpose”, given the changing market reality, organisational requirements and DNA.

Capgemini has extensive experience and a strong track record in helping organisations identify, select, design and build the right planning platform. We ensure that the built planning platform enables the organisation to increase its degree of agility and its operational flexibility. As a result the organisation can gain competitive advantage

This section includes:

• Benefits of Strategic Adaptability
• Capgemini’s approach
• Capgemini capability
• Success stories

The benefits of building the right Planning Platorm

The right planning provides an “evergreen” process that enables management to develop an agile and flexible organisation. More specifically it enables:

• Linkage between market and managed by effectively sensing the nature and speed of market change
• Definition of the right set of priorities and short term objectives
• Re-definition of organisational capabilities and linkage of short term objectives to mid and long term strategy
• Fluid allocation of financial and human resources
• Alignment of the leadership team with senior management and front end employees
• Communication of the right messages to the market (externally) and all organisational levels (internally)
• Definition of where and why existing processes are broken and failing
• Development of a suitable range of performance indicators and a mechanism of monitoring

Capgemini’s approach

We focus our efforts by undertaking three steps:

Defining what is the right platform, given the market reality, the business strategy and the organisational DNA.

Fostering agility by identifying and incorporating “contradictory elements” into the planning process, so that the organisation experience “healthy conditions” that keep it awake:

Capgemini balances contradictory elements such as:

• Systematic and Experimental planning methods
• Formal and Entrepreneurial processes
• Tension and collaboration
• Stable and instable decision making mechanisms
• Standardised and personalised strategic plans

Designing and implementing a “fit for purpose planning platform by:

• Providing a platform of identifying, prioritising and exercising choices that inform the vision and define the strategy formulation
• Supporting managers to develop better information to make better decisions, increasing their confidence in the business’s direction.
• Setting a proper context for budget decisions and performance evaluations, establishing a clear link to resource allocation.
• Establishing a platform that links executives team with middle management and front end employees, promoting a culture of empowerment

Capgemini capability

Capgemini’s capabilities address customer needs in four distinct areas of strategic planning:

• Definition of the right Planning platform
• Development and implementation of the right Planning Process
• Building of a portfolio of Methods and Tools that enable best usage of the planning platform (including knowledge transfer)
• Building of Strategic Planning Support Systems e.g. Accelerated Planning & Decision Making

Capgemini uses a broad range of highly effective techniques such as:

• Collaborative Planning
• Accelerated Planning and Decision Making
• Continuous health check
• Integrated IT support systems

Most importantly Capgemini tailors strategic and business planning to an organisation`s unique identity and DNA.

Success Stories

World-leading Agri-Business

Despite stable to declining market conditions, the European leadership team at this leading declared an ambition for profitable market share growth but realised that success would depend on the ability to implement new systems quickly. A methodology to achieve this was designed in a collaborative approach with the European Management adapting “state of the art” processes and methodologies in “Balanced Scorecard (BSC)”. This was specifically designed and implemented to succeed in the three critical areas most critical for implementation: 1) building leadership alignment; 2) simplifying the strategy into an actionable form; 3) creating clarity for all staff.

Leadership Alignment was developed in a series of workshops where we co-created the frame around the strategic intent . This process started with the Top-Management and was repeated at Area and Country leadership team levels. The resultant team-building effect and cross-functional alignment created a platform for speed and quality of implementation.

The focus and clarity created by the strategic agenda led to a tremendous release of potential with real impact, including a portfolio of product opportunities successfully federating opportunities for significant sales growth while a comprehensive “gap analysis” identified significant sales opportunity in markets. A Marketing & Sales capability development was implemented to facilitate excellence in the marketing and sales and market share growth.

European Railway Firm

Capgemini worked with this European railway firm to develop a software platform supporting the sales and revenue planning as well as an integration of sales and production planning. We provided system support for entire planning process as well as developing and implementing an algorithm to translate sales volume into producible unit and a sales-production matrix to translate the sales volume into producible units based on SAP.

As a result, mid-term planning is executed in an aggregated level, planning is based on historical data and uses previous year data and all staff use the same application and a shared and consistent data basis. The overall planning process is led and controlled by central finance department, while sales planning can be translated into producible units with the sales-production matrix. This is the basis for production and cost planning.