Managing with speed and agility

Businesses have been faced with an unparalleled level of challenges and transformations, such as changing customer demand, supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and inflation. This has created a perfect storm with cost at its center.

To navigate through this storm and ensure the business remains competitive, executives need to reset their cost structures and deploy resources in new ways to build the capabilities necessary to adapt to changing conditions.

The traditional approach of containing, cutting, or optimizing costs is no longer enough. A holistic zero-based approach is required, which involves rethinking priorities from end-to-end, making tradeoffs and redeploying resources to support growth and resilience.

By taking this approach, businesses can transform their cost structures and achieve a new level of strategic flexibility.

Cost transformation

While cost interventions have helped organizations navigate through volatility, they are no longer enough in today's constantly changing world. A one-time cost-cutting approach is not effective in the long term. What companies need is a comprehensive approach to cost transformation that includes new capabilities for making data-driven decisions in real time. This approach can help drive sustainable growth and resilience in the face of ongoing change.

Coping with Inflation and Uncertainty:
5 Strategies for Business Leaders With inflation and uncertainty on the rise, companies must focus on accelerating investments in growth and transforming their costs holistically to build resilience. However, achieving these goals won't be easy. Managing Director Praveen Kishorepuria offers five tips to help business leaders navigate these challenges in the present moment.

Transforming Costs:
More Than Just Cost Reduction Optimizing costs in a sustainable manner requires modernizing capabilities to enhance resilience. Business leaders need real-time visibility into cost drivers across the entire value chain to pinpoint where spend is going, how it impacts business, and how it can be redirected. An advanced, cloud-based analytics platform can help create a new, cost-conscious organizational culture to drive long-term success.

Zero-Based Transformation:
Starting from Scratch Leading organizations are no longer solely focused on cost-cutting and survival, but on reinventing for growth and resilience. Zero-based transformation involves starting from scratch with three core tenets: technology, sustainability, and talent. A report outlines the four keys to successful cost transformation and profit acceleration, emphasizing how future-ready companies tackle challenges holistically to foster growth, resilience, and competitiveness.

Uncovering True Costs in a World of Uncertainty
Before maximizing profit, understanding the cost structure at a granular level is crucial. The "cost-to-serve" methodology is an AI- and analytics-driven approach to illuminating true costs and profitability at the product, SKU, customer, and channel levels. This method considers both traceable and untraceable costs to allocate more precisely and make powerful moves to respond to and embrace change.

Cost transformation that includes new capabilities for making data-driven decisions in real time