Zoli had a great insight of a potential “Blue Ocean” emerging from the Saas/On Demand space. Saas vendors hold customer data and could develop the ability to offer statistical services ranging from benchmarking through process management to process optimization.
Today these offerings have not taken hold but I can imagine selective opt-in by businesses for higher value-add services like:
- Process benchmarking - based on transaction data available voluntary participants could receive real-time comparison of their performance against their peers. These would be for areas not considered competitive edge, most notably finance (headcount allocation, transaction costs, cost of service, billing cycles, DSO), human resources (rev per employee, retention metrics, training metrics, etc), procurement (supplier performance, DPO, etc).
- Process management and optimization - develop systematic recommendations on how to tweak workflow, process steps to have a more streamlined, lower cost process. The system can monitor everything from dispute management (DSO) through supplier performance and recommend corrective actions (replace suppliers with a better one).
If we couple low user cost of on-demand with process optimization typically provided only by large-scale business process reengineering with ERP/CRM enablement then we have real value proposition. Low cost is important but as most companies move to growth mode from efficiency optimization we need more than cost savings to make on demand stick.
Technorati Tags: benchmarking, Blue Ocean, on demand, process management, Saas
On Demand and Process Optimization…
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