Provide info. about business planning tool, Sustainable Fisheries Guide for Business Planning Tool, and Financial Analysis Business Planning Tool.

How nonprofits are adapting a business planning tool for enhanced performance

Xerox Corporation, the world's largest manufacturer of copy machines and a leading producer of computers, began experimenting with benchmarking in the late 1970s, when its Japanese competitors brought out lower-cost, high-quality products backed by strong customer service. In this intensely competitive environment, learning was a matter of survival.

Oddly, however, Xerox's critical benchmarking breakthrough came not by focusing on the competitors who threatened it, but by looking to a best-in-its-class company from another industry altogether.

erox understood that performance issues are often a function of generic organizational processes, not just product design. Xerox had targeted slow order-fulfillment, a complaint of many customers and a top priority for improvement.

In focusing on this process, a senior manager suddenly realized, from personal experience, that L.L. Bean, the catalog clothing company, could move from receipt of a customer order on the phone to product delivery in a very short time.

To better understand the best practices behind this success, Xerox headed for L.L. Bean's headquarters in Freeport, Maine -- not to its competitors in Tokyo. (Presumably, it also helped that L.L. Bean, flattered by the attentions of a giant multinational, was not a competitor.)

Since that time, Xerox has embraced benchmarking as an active learning business planning tool and has urged managers throughout the company to adopt it. Former chairman David T. Kearns promoted benchmarking as a core practice. He defined it as "the continuous process of measuring our products, services, and practices against our toughest competitors or those companies renowned as leaders. As customer services benchmarking manager Warren Jeffries explains, benchmarking at Xerox is still very much a matter of competitive advantage. It is used to "keep Xerox's edge razor-sharp... to discover where something is being done with less time, lower cost, fewer resources, and better technology.

Benchmarking begins with learning. Xerox identifies a problem in its organization or discovers something that someone else does better. To do this, of course, Xerox must measure its own performance. Without information about its own practices, processes, and results, it could not identify a gap to close. Therefore, Jeffries counsels organizations interested in benchmarking to "know yourself"
as a first step.

Xerox's approach to benchmarking puts processes first and metrics second. For example, Xerox may discover that a competitor produces a copier whose outer shell costs $1,000. The shell for a comparable Xerox product is $1,200. Xerox will use the difference
in cost not as an automatic goal, but as a signal to look at the production and purchasing processes that result in those shell costs to discover the sources of the difference and determine if action is needed.

Although Xerox is an acknowledged leader in this practice, and has been since 1979, it must remain vigilant about keeping the practice in continual use throughout the organization. In most organizations, there is a tendency for doing to eclipse planning,
and planning to eclipse learning. In Xerox, these tendencies are countered with visible and frequent reinforcement by top management, investment in a position such as Jeffries, and commitment to training in the use of benchmarking.

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Sustainable Fisheries Guide: A Business Planning Tool

Developed in partnership between The NZ Seafood Industry Council Ltd (SeaFIC), Te Ohu Kai Moana - The Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission and WWF New Zealand with funding from the Sustainable Management Fund, Sustainable Fisheries: The Future of your Business is a business planning tool for addressing the environmental management responsibilities of a fisheries stakeholder organisation or business.

The Guide includes an environmental assessment checklist and management options to enable fishers and fisheries managers to identify issues, determine goals, and monitor their progress towards those goals.

The Guide doesn’t provide a ‘one size fits all’ solution’. Rather, it promotes a range of options and tools that fishers and fisheries managers can select from and develop to meet their needs.

The Guide is one of the ways that the industry can give effect to the New Zealand Seafood Industry Charter. The Charter promotes industry responsibility and commitment, the adoption of best practice in governance, management and operations, and a forward-looking and proactive approach to positioning the industry for the future.

Sustainability issues will continue to challenge the seafood industry and demand collaborative, industry-wide solutions. This Guide incorporates a work in progress, learning by doing approach, which echoes the substance of the Charter.

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Financial Analysis Business Planning Tool

Welcome to the interactive financial analysis for business planning tool. By linking business decisions to financial results this business planning tool will help you analyse your business performance under different business scenarios. It will help you conduct "what-if" and "goal-seek" analysis as you develop your sales plan or operations budgets.

Important Privacy Information

None of the data that you enter is stored/saved. Information entered by you is used by your browser to do calculations and it is not passed back to the server to be stored/saved. Because of this design feature, your actual data is made available from one screen to the next as you navigate between screens. Changes made at any stage overwrite previous values.

User Tips/Recommendations

Printing: All screens are best printed in landscape mode (page/setup). Printing results as you work through various business management scenarios is recommended.

You may open a number of browser windows as you work through the business planning tool to store results from multiple business scenarios. This will allow you to review business scenarios by clicking between the browser windows.

The interactive business planning tool has been designed to work in version 4 or higher of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

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Business Planning Tools

The key to good planning is making good assumptions. Having good information that wil help you confirm your assumptions goes a long way towards having confidence in your business plan. FRANdata has a menu of business planning tools that can provide you with the information you need.

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