Strategic management

We offer you our core competencies in the following areas:

• Business Performance Management;
• Engineering Consultancy and Management;
• International Procurement;
• Investment in emerging markets;
• IT Management and Consultancy;
• Media Consultancy and Management;
• Project Management and Co-ordination;
• Technology Transfer.

Our expertise covers all aspect of developing, financing, buying, selling and operating in specific businesses. Most assignments involve in-depth field research, detailed market and financial analysis and regular briefings.

We tailor our input to your specific requirements and a Managing Partner leads every assignment. This ensures that we can provide you with unequivocal answers to the critical questions.

The scope of our services ranges far beyond that of feasibility study and include market monitoring and systems definition during the project development phase, recruitment and pre-commissioning assistance, performance monitoring and post-commissioning enhancements.

We provide a dedicated service to meet the development needs irrespective of whether you are an experienced operator or an investor making your first step into a specific industry.

Our advice in areas of project planning, marketing and appraisal is completely objective, our counsel on the improvement of management and operational performance wholly unbiased.

Determining the strategic direction of your company depends on a clear definition of corporate objectives, a thorough understanding of the resources that you could apply, and most importantly an awareness of the opportunities the market presents.

The increasingly international nature of business in related industries makes it essential for your company to give this dimension full consideration in formulation of a corporate strategy. We are well qualified to provide you with this vital international perspective. Our wealth of international experience and market intelligence makes us ideally suited to assist you in strategic planning whether it involves new products, new markets, or the re-positioning of existing facilities in the context of changing market conditions.

Balancing the Score - A practical, tried and tested approach for turning vision into reality.

Management Questions

Some of the questions that may trouble your business are:

• Are you communicating and reinforcing your business’s strategy to the point that all your employees, regardless of function, are executing the same plan?
• Are there gaps in your measurement system? Do the metrics review the past or guide the future? Is your focus more on tactical, short term, month-to-month issues at the expense of strategic issues?
• Do your internal reporting requirements, administrative processes, and top-down policies stifle creativity and innovation?
• Are you making the right kind of investments to grow the business above industry averages?
• Are your employees developing the right kind of skills to be successful in an ever changing and competitive industry?
• Do you understand the cause and effect of you plans and actions? Can you articulate the key levers of performance down to a few important drivers?

Hard questions and as one might guess you may not have all the answers. But you have lots of ideas and it is in the spirit of searching for new ideas that you may begin the implementation of the Balanced Score Card for your business.

Putting the vision into practice

Balanced Scorecard is a practical approach for helping you to translate strategy into action. It starts from your vision and strategies; from here critical success factors are defined.

Measures are then constructed that aid target-setting and performance measurement in areas critical to the strategies. Hence, Balanced Scorecard does also provide a framework for measuring the performance of your business, derived from your vision and strategies, and reflecting the most important aspects of your business.

Traditional performance measurement, focusing on external accounting data, are becoming obsolete and something more is needed to provide the information age enterprises with efficient planning tools. For this purpose there are four different perspectives from which your company’s activity can be evaluated:

• Financial perspective (what do you have to do to be considered successful by your owner(s) or shareholders?);
• Customer perspective (What do you need to deliver to be considered successful by your customers?);
• Process perspective (in what processes should you excel in order to succeed?);
• Learning and innovation perspective (how will you sustain your ability to change and improve?).

The Benefits

The benefits of applying Balanced Scorecard can be summarised as follows:

• Balanced Scorecard helps you align key performance measures with strategy at all levels of your business;
• Balanced Scorecard provides you with a comprehensive picture of business operations;
• The methodology facilitates communication and understanding of business goals and strategies at all levels of your organisation;
• The balanced scorecard concept provides you with strategic feedback and learning.

Balanced Scorecard helps you create a dashboard of the business indicators to help you drive carefully through the complexities and reach the desired destination safely.

ARA’s implementation experts have an established and verifiable project based successful track record. Our practical approach will help you to turn your vision into reality, no matter what the size of your business and sector in which you operate, and is applicable from sole trader to multinationals.

Please contact us at info@arallp.com to discover how we can help you define and execute your business strategy more effectively.