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Organisational support for a big city
MÖBIUS has these recent years been active in various cities. Another city council has recently been added to that list. Since the beginning of 2008, a team of MÖBIUS consultants has been active at this city to optimise the operation of all city council services.

For the city council there are two major changes on the horizon. First and foremost being the implementation of the Council decree, which requires a number of significant improvements in organisational and financial areas. In addition, a major part of the council departments will be relocated to a new central council office in the course of 2008. This has an impact both on counter services and thus interaction with civilians and on internal operations between the various departments. The city has also compiled a plan to re-evaluate staff training and occupation during the implementation of these changes. The city chose to appoint MÖBIUS as an organisation specialist, charged with providing guidance and support in creating a customer-focused, efficient and effective organisation.

During the execution of the project, the emphasis will lie on a rapid implementation of the established improvement points. The results of the initial process analysis are already visible on the work floor and for the residents as well thanks to an improved level of service. This quick start up has partly been made possible by the generation of an intensive involvement of the city council employees. Interaction and knowledge transfer are crucial in this regard.

The decision was taken to devote attention in the first place to the analysis of the current counter services and their redesign in the framework of the approaching relocation to one central council office. In addition, the entire operations of the city will be analysed and optimised. These management-wide optimisation initiatives will be executed in phases to spread the impact of the project on the organisation and to ensure that the rapid implementation of these improvement paths is given the highest priority.

Finally, an integrated implementation plan has been compiled which involves a number of directors. The changes are anchored in operations on the basis of (updated) project descriptions used to form the basis of resource planning. The results include dynamic staff planning, IT requirements planning and budgeting. By coupling the resources to the processes, the city is now able to detect, define and monitor evolutions in the future.

MÖBIUS helps a client active in the steel trade in segmenting products and customers
Our client manufactures and distributes steel tubes. Though the steel industry is a traditional one, the market has been turbulent over the last decade. Steel prices are highly dynamic. Price competition with imports from Asia and Turkey has been fierce. Retailers have become increasingly powerful and demanding on their suppliers. In segmenting customers and products, ou client will increase customer service and improve profitability.

How come? Not all customers are equal. They do not have the same priorities and requirements, nor do they have the same contribution and profitability for the company. Neither do products. They may serve different markets with changing priorities and requirements for highly different contributions and profitability. Segmenting customers and products increases this awareness and allows for differentiating service.

MÖBIUS used a 5-step approach to develop a segmentation blueprint. In each step there were several workshops with the project team that consisted of the entire sales team and key persons from the planning department. Starting with the identification of relevant customer/product segmentation parameters and service parameters a first segmentation matrix was formulated. Based on this matrix, a segmentation decision support tool was built to allow the team to test different settings and scenarios and to asses the impact on profitability and working capital requirement. Finally the impact on different business processes was investigated and a procedure for segmentation was developed to prepare the implementation of the segmentation model.

The results included among others:

A comprehensible and marketable segmentation matrix.
Detailed analysis results to support the different parameter settings to segment products/customers and service settings to differentiate service.
Analysis of the inventory requirements showed that the result of the segmentation was feasible within current working capital constraints
Analysis of the benefits and costs indicated a potential increase in profitability between 52% and 94% and an expected increase in volume between 0 and 10%.

Starting with demand planning, in a next step our client will align its supply chain processes with the market segmentation. Though changing a process is always difficult, the belief is strong it will bring a better future and so tell the numbers!