So for the first time in my life, I got my dream work, handed in this report to my manager. She is delighted to discuss with me further on some "good ideas". So guys and geeks if you have some ideas especially on how to build up "solution bricks" (I invented this term), don't hesitate to leave your comments.

1.    Personal understandings of Orange business development

Orange business developers, with their telecommunications/IT knowledge-build and existing solutions in hand, as well as their project management capabilities and business techniques, aim at gaining new customers globally and at penetrating existing markets worldwide. These techniques include:

1.1          Assessment of marketing opportunities and target markets

Wherever there is a need for the following services, there is a market for Orange Business Services:

·       network integration services

·       communication applications

·       IT outsourcing

·       IT security

In particular, the key account management will be introduced later.

1.2          Business intelligence gathering, both on customers and competitors

They should globally gather the information about telecommunications market trends, new actions of other solution providers and telecom operators, new emerging technologies that may attract or distract the attention of some customers, and study carefully the business intelligence information like the monthly “KeyObs” report from each country.

1.3          Generating leads for possible sales

The Orange business developers can generate leads from the following general marketing lead generation processes: trade shows, direct marketing, advertising, Internet marketing.

They can also generate more leads by participating in international and local conferences (especially in the work of technological standardization). For example in China they should discuss dynamically with the Chinese Information Industry Ministry to have more influences on local market:

·       lifting up the fame by mere voice

·       influencing the technological standards in favor of Orange products.

Whichever means they choose, technological innovation and facility should be emphasized.

1.4          Advising on, and enforcing sales processes with business partners

Orange business developers work with business partners like CISCO and Accenture. Therefore efficient collaboration and project steering (will be discussed later) are significant to reduce the project delay and ensure the TTM (time to market) of an offer.

1.5          Review and gather experiences

They should follow up the customer usages and get the feedback to the central organization (marketing/BU/Gloabal Sales) for strategic studies.

1.6          Successful product model design and business process modeling

Normally: Orange business developers can collect related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product to serve a particular goal, like highly secured M2M (Machine To Machine) tracking, for a particular customer or customers.

Based on success: Orange Business Services can develop some product models and solution patterns to easily implement on new customers and new marketplaces.

Business process modeling: A business process begins with a customer’s need and ends with a customer’s need fulfillment.

A business process model is a model of one or more business processes, and defines the ways in which operations are carried out to accomplish Orange’s intended objectives.

Such a model remains an abstraction and depends on the intended use of the model. It can describe the workflow or the integration between business processes.

Finally, because of the high involvement of technological project innovation, the concept knowledge management can be used to standardize and facilitate the modeling.

2.    key account management

Key Account Management is based on the fact that 80 percent of the profit is realized with less than 20 percent of Orange Business Services’ customers. Aiming at getting more customers, the proportion between investment and income can be even larger.

Key Account Management is a kind of strategy that Orange concentrates its effort on the big customers who are carefully selected by their market and innovation potentials and their growth.

Best practice actions of Key Account Management

First, we analyze the accounts. For Orange Business Services, this can be done in different verticals (industrial sectors):

-         Rank accounts by their improvements potentials

-         Re-deploy resources to highest potential accounts

Then we seek to set account objectives:

-         Study account requirements/needs/capabilities

-         Plan account actions

-         Target account goals/accountability for profit improvement

Next, we plan the account strategy:

-         Include customer in account planning process

-         Develop both internal and customer targets

-         Tie actions/events to improvement opportunities

Now, we can take planned actions:

-         Monitor performance against tactical plan

-         Hold account team members accountable

Finally we review the account:

-         Evaluate account performance

-         Benchmark Orange’s own performance

-         Evaluate the relationship with the account and skills to deal with account

Examples of the study of the job and usages of customer per vertical:

Distribution sector (various large commercial companies)

Orange can make the shopping experience easier by showing informational videos or letting the goods interact with display screens, cash registers through RFIDs. It can also develop online shopping, guarantee product availability, optimize, secure the supply chain with the M2M (Machine To Machine) tracking, manage the stock and offer video surveillance solutions.

Health sector (GIE DMP, GIE Sesame-Vitale):

Orange solutions bring new technologies to patients and health professionals, get networked, monitor patients’ health conditions and access medical records remotely. These solutions are based on secured infrastructure, access and high quality of service.

3.    Project steering and “quick wins”

In “Dolphin Plan”, which emphasizes on the idea of “quick wins”, business developers should work closely with their business partners like Accenture and CISCO to reduce the project time cost and ensure the Time To Market of the offer. Customers who are in genuine and urgent need of these offers will be gained, maintained and pleased.

The key to both “quick wins” and a sustainable process is a focused implementation.

Focused:  Dolphin plan business coordinators should commit key resources and time to implementing the process to best practice standards within a short time-frame.

The committed resources must include:

-         Well-organized human resource: people dedicated to, and measured against

-         The previous success of the implementation within the time period allotted.  (It will be discussed in the last part: Solution modeling and successful brick development)

-         Adequate information technology support (with dynamic human involvement) to ensure the needed data can be quickly extracted from the information systems.

This initial idea of “quick wins” or “fast track” will prefer quick data extraction, or data import/export by manual work rather than waiting for the unsynchronized IT systems to automatically extract data from one machine to another, with a pre-defined time delay (sometimes 24 or 48 hours) between machines to ensure the complex data transmission. So the dynamic human involvement makes the data directly and quickly transmitted and obtained.

-         Access to the appropriate and pertinent demand, supply, new product, and financial information. This information must reflect reality as decisions will be based on the information.

The key to developing credible information is having the process managed by knowledgeable people with access to the appropriate support tools. These information tools should provide the ability to capture, import, and summarize data. This makes the data presentable to the executive team in a consistent format and lends itself to the decision-making process.

4.    Flexible offers/products

4.1          General understanding/rough definition:

A flexible offer is a base product which is industrialized and offered by Orange Business Services, on which the customer (ideally with the solution of Orange) can add/integrate a series of new functional modules with the growth of need.

4.2          Interest for customers:

As its name “flexible” indicates, customers are happy to use a product of which the functions can be flexibly enriched or modified with their growth of service need and budget.

4.3          Interest for Orange Business Services:

Customers are most likely to cooperate further with Orange Business Services whenever there is a new module to be added on the currently implemented flexible product. (Despite the fact that Orange should NOT intend to make a closed product to naively ensure that it is always with Orange solution that we are technically capable to add the module. Standards in ISO and RFC by ITU should be respected as more as possible).

4.4          An example: Intelligent Network in China

The intelligent network was constructed in 2007 by China Netcom with the investment of China Netcom and some big clients.

SSP: Service Switch Point, manufactured by Huawei and Shanghai Bell-Alcatel

SDC: Subscriber Data Center, manufactured by Huawei and Shanghai Bell-Alcatel

In this example we can see that the infrastructure which contains SDC and SSP can be considered as a flexible product, on which customers can add new modules if they need to add new intelligent services (pre-pay, one-dial, video-conf or color-ring, etc).

4.5          Ideas on how to make flexible offers/products

First of all, to start off, the general idea is to have a system that is partially modifiable.

We usually look at centralized systems (like the Single Sign-On authentication system to find out whether it can be potentially industrialized to become a flexible product, because the distributed components are much cheaper than the central component. Customers are unlikely to change frequently the central component which costs too much. And the distributed components all depend on the central component. It is the distributed components that bring the main functions or service changes that the customer needs.

Secondly, it has to be very standardized and industrialized. As is already mentioned in 4.3, we can meet different standards (RFC, IEEE, ISO and even 3GPP) and other solution providers can also access to our flexible product and develop new modules.

Finally, the interfaces and protocols have to be diverse and rich to reach fully the spirit of flexibility.

It is recommended to reserve some new/extensible interfaces and protocol supports for future use.

5.    Ideas on solution modeling and successful brick development

Solution modeling and successful brick development should be a very standardized procedure with different steps:

1.    Analyze and benchmark the successful sales. Choose one successful project.

2.    Brainstorm with a team of people who used to be involved in this success to generalize into different models or sub-models (because people think differently and they have been working in different parts of the project). These models include the technology they used, human resource involved and workflows.

3.    Combine these models to build up a comprehensive and complete model (during which we should correct the mistakes).

4.    Use the standardized theories like business process modeling or business model design to analyze carefully this model. This step is to look at what we need to save and get rid of too specific and useless details which are not necessary to be implemented in the future offers.

5.    Once it is standardized, we construct small solution bricks with the help of “knowledge management”, which provides us with some modeling solutions.