Ascent Group

Creating stakeholder & customer value through innovating Service Usability

Lafarge, a world leader in building materials, found its business units (BU) across Asia Pacific unable to fully utilize the resources & benefits of their new IT shared services initiative. The BU executives didn’t seem to have a clear picture of the services offered or the value that those services added to their individual BU’s success.

As the Asia Pacific Regional IT division was tasked with rapidly expanding their service offerings to all locations in support of regional growth, being able to guide the right people to the right service was critical to their success.

Lafarge recruited Ascent’s expertise in service usability to purposefully design value-based service propositions, and then redesign & present their IT services portfolio in terms that their BU customers could clearly understand, as well as successfully utilize to support growing numbers of customers and transaction volumes.

The Engagement

Applying our experience with Service Revenue models from various industries, we introduced to Lafarge a concept of service portfolio management and service bundling commonly found in the financials industry.

Following a comprehensive Service Potential Audit, we worked closely with Lafarge through a series of workshops to identify expectations, current realities, potential opportunities, communication processes & Service Delivery gaps. From there:

Phase 1: First 90 Days

• Created a new value proposition – along with corresponding goals & objectives – around the concept of IT Governance. We effectively realigned the regional IT division’s function & visibility as a technology advisory partner and central regional hub for best practices in IT management.
• Re-designed and packaged their service offerings into 5 service lines and 20 sub-services. Designed to align offerings with customer needs, this new structure communicated consistent value to all stakeholders through clear definitions & value measurements.
• Interviewed the BU CEO’s and CFO’s within the region to further validate assumptions re the new service bundles and their ability to drive service subscriptions for Regional IT. Feedback showed that Regional IT was on the right track.

Phase 2: Next 9 Months

• Prepared a multi-phased communications plan to successfully launch the new positioning at a regional CEO conference, followed by an Asia-wide launch. These were supported by a schedule of content development designed to add layers of customer value and continuously reinforce the new value proposition and service benefits.
• Worked with Regional IT’s internal team to build a web-based portal that would deliver timely service-related information and a best practices knowledge base while continuing to promote the value of the new service bundles.

Results

• Lafarge realized a 50% increase in service subscriptions within the first year following the implementation, exceeding their forecasted expectations and putting Lafarge on track to successful achievement of their targeted cost efficiency & pan-regional process standardization goals.
• The division was successfully repositioned from an internal cost centre to a revenue centre, with improved collaboration between the regional IT division and regional CEOs and CFOs delivering success stories and adoption of best practices across regions.
• The project’s success has positioned the Asia Pacific regional IT division as Service Innovation leaders. Not only was the project hailed as a Best Practices blueprint for the organization, but it also paved the way for a new knowledge management initiative aimed at increasing overall regional IT service capabilities.

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