Benchmarking /Best Practice Sharing
Benchmarking is the process of improving your organization's performance by continuously identifying, understanding, and adapting the best practices and processes that have been successfully implemented and refined by leading organizations. Karlamar Associates can help your organization benchmark lead-edge processes and share best practices through the facilitation of multi-client studies. You will gain insights from premier organizations and other study participants, as well as learn what practices actually work and what is needed to successfully implement them in your organization.   

Current State Assessment
Organizations need to identify and document the current state of their own business processes before they can assess meaningful change. Key areas to review include leadership processes, strategic plans, connection to customers and marketplace, information infrastructure, resource management, process management, and business results. Karlamar Associates can help you baseline your organization to enable you to track and measure improvement.    

Employee Satisfaction & Loyalty
We all know the drill, once a year a mandatory employee satisfaction survey is conducted. You complete the questionnaire thinking that it may actually make a difference, but as in past years by the time the results are shared, a reorganization has taken place and the new management team has already dismissed the results. Although past managers may receive their results before taking their new positions, they are on to their new assignment and are rarely held accountable for actually correcting behaviors or issues surfaced by the last team. On those rare occasions where the organization is stable, managers often charge their employees with the awkward task of developing and presenting corrective actions. How can these employees speak openly about management issues and problems, without giving up their anonymity and leaving themselves open to potential retaliation? The employee survey, which should be a good diagnostic tool for organizational improvement, is often ignored, misused or manipulated.

Karlamar Associates can help make employee surveys a constructive, rather than destructive tool. We not only conduct and analyze survey results, but also facilitate the communication between employees and the organization. We work with your employees to better understand sensitive issues raised and work with the appropriate personnel to resolve the issues at the right level.    

Customer Loyalty & Retention
Customer Loyalty involves more than just measuring the perceived performance of an isolated product. To truly understand customer loyalty, you need to comprehend the effects of the competitive environment, such as understanding how satisfied your customers are relative to your competitors' customers, and how satisfied they are compared to the best companies. This broader perspective provides greater insight and a more realistic view of your company's relative strengths and weaknesses at satisfying and retaining customers.

 

Karlamar Associates can help you measure and manage this "customer understanding" at all points of contact.   

Business Planning & Strategy Development
The adage, "a failure to plan is a plan for failure" applies to business planning. A business plan should help you operationalize your strategies and provide a roadmap for their implementation. The plan helps you focus on what you do and don't do, and helps tie all aspects of the business together, providing a context for future business decisions. It also helps you to anticipate obstacles, and assess your direction against changes in the marketplace and / or environment.

Strategic plans direct where an organization is going over the long haul, how it's going to get there, and how the organization will know if it has achieved its goal. Strategic plans are evergreen, and require continuous refinement. They should be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure alignment of the business plan's tactical activities.
Karlamar Associates can help you define what your organization is all about, with a focus on the future. We will help you assess your current situation, define what your organization needs to be, and help you develop the strategies and tactical plans you need to get it there.

"Scenario planning is a discipline for rediscovering the original entrepreneurial power of creative foresight in context of accelerated change, greater complexity and genuine uncertainty. " - Pierre Wack, Royal Dutch Shell 1984

 

Planning by definition is future oriented, based on how you think the future will unfold. Since the future is often unpredictable, scenarios can help you to play out alternative paths. Scenarios don't actually predict the future, but instead help you plan for it by forcing you to question your assumptions. They bring attention to forces that push the future in different directions, so that you can recognize them when the actually occur. Recognizing these signs can help you avoid surprises, and allow you to adapt and act accordingly. Given the impossibility of knowing the unknown, it is wise to seek strategies that play out well across several possible futures. Karlamar Associates can help facilitate the development and interpretation of these scenarios so you can better plan your future.