Growing and competitive local and global markets are challenging organisations to keep pace. Critical shortages in time and skills, large scale internal changes to processes and capability, and constantly changing technology capabililites and needs, and require organisations to make informed decisions regarding how best to deliver services to the business.

Following is a brief description of our core offerings that support the organisations options for delivering these services to the business.

Sourcing and Selection	Vendor and Service Management	Sourcing Price Benchmarking	Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning Services

High performing businesses view information as a strategic asset - that is, a source of both operational excellence and competitive advantage. CHERUB can assist senior management achieve greater business value from capturing, maintaining and developing corporate knowledge. Turning information into vital knowledge allows organisations to gain significant internal operational efficiencies and effectiveness, as well as gaining and maintaining external competitive advantages.

Our services include the development and management of:

• IT strategy
• Sourcing strategy

See our capability statement for a more detailed description of our Strategic Planning Services.

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Sourcing and Selection Services 

Outsourcing research from any number of sources over the years reveals that the outsourcing drivers cited by organisations do not vary greatly, irrespective of the industry, client, service or year. The qualifier being that whilst they may not vary in context, they do vary in priority or relevance according to the specifics of the organisation’s business environment at the time.

Outsourcing, therefore, is not a declining phenomena and more organisations use outsourcing as a management tool to deliver services to their internal and extended user base. Despite this consistency of purpose and the appreciable increase in understanding, experience and maturity in the implementation of sourcing solutions, many organisations are still not fully satisfied with the outcomes of their outsourced arrangements ... sometimes, with dramatic results.

See our capability statement for a more detailed description of our Sourcing and Selection Services.

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Vendor and Service Management Services

Research indicates that many clients are not fully satisfied with the outcomes of their outsourced arrangements. This does not necessarily mean that they intend to terminate, but there may be questions around: 

• Is the contract meeting my original business case outcomes?
• Am I paying more than I expected due to “additional costs”?
• Am I managing risk appropriately?
• Is my Vendor focussing on the contract rather than the relationship?
• Is the contract still matched to my needs?
• Are people receiving the quality of service I expected?

If these are the types of issues your organisation is trying to understand and resolve, then perhaps you need to consider a more effective Vendor Management regime, that will help ensure that you know the answers to all of the above, and ensure that you are managing the Vendor appropriately to secure a positive outcome.

CHERUB assists organisations to establish a Vendor and Services Management regime which provides a clear understanding of stakeholder responsibilities against the varied types of contracts and stages of the contract lifecycle.

See our capability statement for a more detailed description of our Vendor and Service Management Services.

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Sourcing Price Benchmarking Services

CHERUB Sourcing Price Benchmarking Service is built upon well-proven, best-practice methods which we apply and tailor to suit the specific requirements and objectives of our clients.

Benchmarking exercises can range from simple analysis of spending as a percentage of organisational unit and enterprise budgets and the comparison of those measures to broad industry metrics, through to detailed comparative benchmarks of the cost efficiency and service effectiveness of particular business, administration or infrastructure service functions and processes. Comparative benchmarks may be internal to an enterprise, where the spend profile, cost efficiency or service effectiveness is compared between various organisational units or year-on-year; or they may be external where enterprise measures and metrics are compared to those of a chosen peer group of enterprises.

Benchmarking exercises may also be performed to compare the prices paid for services received from external service providers (outsourcers).

For comparative benchmark studies where the comparison is to a peer group of external entities, our preference is to conduct a joint study by engaging with our primary client and the target peer entities. This collaborative approach enables all the participating parties to benefit.

Regardless of the nature of the benchmark, the keys to successful benchmarking studies include:

• Clearly defined and consistently applied scope boundaries;
• Clearly defined and consistently applied definitions for all data categories;
• Standard approaches for the normalisation of data;
• The use of recognised and meaningful measures and metrics; and when conducting comparative benchmark studies; and
• The selection of appropriate peer entities (or peer services, in the case of price benchmarking) according to agreed criteria.

Our benchmarking methodology provides and rigorously applies those success keys.

Typically, when we conduct a detailed benchmark study we are engaged to examine one or more particular business or support functions and determine both the efficiency of those functions, and their effectiveness in terms of service outcomes. Efficiency measures may be limited to just cost efficiency; or extended to include measurement of personnel efficiency.

Measuring the effectiveness of each function or service being studied provides context for understanding the cost efficiency measures and metrics. This enables the benchmark study results to be understood and interpreted on an holistic basis, providing a solid foundation for informed action. For studies of this depth we work with our clients (and any target peer entities) to gather comprehensive data pertaining to:

• All operational and personnel costs, dissected according to our industry-standard chart of accounts;
• Full-Time Equivalent staff numbers by job category or function;
• Workload processed or handled during the period of the study;
• Function or service outcome measures; and
• The complexity of the environment in which the function or service operates (for example, geographic spread, organisation structure, use of technology, agreed service levels, etc.).

We collaborate with our clients and apply our methodology to define the data collection requirements; and then assist them as may be required to collect and refine that data. We then take the collected data, apply any normalisations which may be needed, and produce the benchmark analysis and key metrics. We then work with our clients to interpret the results, draw sensible and balanced conclusions, and identify appropriate actions.

See our capability statement for a more detailed description of our Sourcing Price Benchmarking Services.

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