Lumiere Swot Analysis

Mission: Provide customized business solutions that enable our client’s growth while providing a platform to attract, develop, excite and retain professional talent who seek to integrate work and life

Strategies: 

• Provide customized business solutions through high-end/high customized management system to personalize and cater to their employee and customer needs.
• Provide flexible and learning organization environment for the employees through policies, collaboration and resource planning
• Engaging with stakeholders and leveraging existing client data and info to build strong relationships

SWOT: Based on SWOT analysis, Lumiere should use their strengths in providing customized business solutions, flexible working environment and strong customer relationships as their competitive advantages. It is very crucial for Lumiere to sustain their strengths going forward as they are competing with other large competitors and planning on an expansion to other countries. One major weakness is 30% overstaffing on projects compared to the competitors. This poses ineffective resource planning and quality control. Furthermore, since the company has gone through multiple IT changes, it is questionable that their most important users, their employees, are satisfied and on the same page with what management desires.  This is where Lumiere should take a step back and try to understand their employee motivation and readiness for change.

Strengths:

• Customer retention is high (80%)
• Client satisfaction through 24/7 access to services
• Quick response to technology as a SME
• SaaS (Cloud) – multiple benefits
• Flexible work process and environment
• Less infrastructure costs through virtualization

Weakness:

• Overstaffing by 30% compared the competitors
• Multiple adoption of technology in the short span of time
• Lack of employee motivation
• Lack of effective employee training
• Cost restrictions and lack of resources to build IT solutions

Opportunities:

• Customer growth
• Possible expansion to different countries
• Possible high end IT solutions in the long run

Threats:

• Competitions
• International regulations and laws

Key Stakeholders:

• Lumiere Management: Deeman and Milind wants the company to:

• Leverage on modern IT to provide quality service to customers
• Cost was not deterrent, high customization is needed to ensure quality of service
• Milind wants to know the next steps when expansion takes place.
• IT solutions were not core to the business -> solve problems with IT without being resource-intensive.  Outsourcing is the option

• Employees: easy/less to learn, communication and motivation and accountability in their work
• Customers: convenience and professionalism
• Investors (domestic and international): stable growth
• Government/International regulations: ensure that legal aspects are met by the companies and all the security needs.

Key Success Factors:

• Service quality
• Encourage work-life balance and social cause of giving women the chance to have a career
• Technologically advanced to compete in the industry, on par with other big market-research companies
• Improve cost margins
• Learning organization through knowledge sharing
• Effective workflows for better management and transparency
• Tight security to protect the interests of its stakeholders

Benefits of Cloud (page 7)

1. Knowledge Management:

• Helped researches substantiate their own work from available reports and articles
• Repository for recording sessions from “Learning Monday”
• Allowed team to leverage past experiences and compete with established players

1. Employee Insights:

• Employee can understand their roles and inefficiencies and how both affected the process
• Increased level of transparency throughout -> gradual culture change to action accountability

1. Business Process

• Increased efficiency of the company’s business process:

• no ad-hoc approvals (all rationale-based), history of all requests to identify the process bottlenecks and streamline. Requests are rerouted when decision maker is absent under short notice

• Issue identification with current processes

• applications and disbursals of payments were more tightly monitored and controlled

• Increase accountability level because both approvals and rejections had to be explained

1. Project management:

• Assess project stages and next steps and assign project responsibilities
• Provided clear and immediate communication on the status of tasks

1. Collaboration

Cloud Challenges Minimization:

1. Internet connectivity: alternatives to internet is:

1. Virtual private networks (VPN)
2. Virtual local-area networks (VLAN)

1. Lack of legal understanding: Even if you have a great contract with the cloud provider with all the right protections, it is still very important for the company to do a thorough due diligence on the cloud provider to be sure it is adequately secured and has appropriate backup capabilities

• Initial Due Diligence
• Termination
• Supplier transfer

Questions that you should consider prior to evaluating cloud services providers include:

• Is this cloud service a true core business of the provider?
• How financially stable is the provider?
• Is the company outsourcing any aspect of the service to a third party, and if so, does the third party have the appropriate arrangements with the provider?
• Does the physical security of its datacenters meet your legal, regulatory and business needs?
• Are its business continuity and disaster recovery plans consistent with your business needs?
• What is its level of technical expertise within its operations team?
• How long has the company been offering the service, and does it have a track record with verifiable customers?
• Does the provider offer any indemnification?

1. Contract negotiations: When outsourcing, it is difficult to negotiate terms and responsibilities with providers.

Company Issues:

1. Overstaffing by 30% => Offset costs in other places?

1. Analysis: The perks of establishing a virtual workplace seems like a great incentive for employees as it provided employees with flexible work options.  However, Lumiere noticed that this initiative actually decreased the quality of work provided to their business clients. The 3 current cloud applications do not suggest an increase in employee working together to provide quality work or show any sign of motivation to do so.
2. Recommendations: One option is to use cloud technology to better connect remote employees to each other to get the job done quicker and in a more efficient manner. In addition to this, Lumière should implement a better resource planning system (embedded in the cloud system) to be able to forecast staffing needs. Lumière would have to decide on severance pay plans to provide the employees it decides to terminate; or it may decide to keep those extra employees on contracts to avoid long-term overstaffing issues
3. Implementation and challenges: Resource planning system or a new cloud technology would cause company to spend time and money to research and implement. Aside from that, employees have to take on new responsibilities and training which they might hesitate and the desired results might not be plausible. Before implementing a new system, Lumiere should conduct an employee survey to study employee motivations and what they need to succeed at their jobs. Then, the company should involve the major employees (managers and team leads) in planning and decision-making process so they can download the changes to their employees in a timely manner.

• Challenges: Employees will hesitate and won’t commit to the change due to increased workload. Motivation plan is needed.

1. Employee Motivation & Employee Resistance to change

1. Analysis: Although the organization implemented cloud computing to hopefully solve their problems, there is however no software that can be provided to motivate employees to provide quality work. Even though the executives were able to quickly identify the systems inefficiency, the implementation of new systems resulted in employees constantly having to be trained on using the system. Even though Lumiere has weekly learning session- “Learning Monday” in place, it is actually inefficient and a waste of time when employees are trained using a system, and it is eventually replaced by another system in a short span of time. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) suggests that managers cannot make employees use a new system until the level of comfort is present. Employees could resist using the new system until proper training is provided. This may be difficult since working virtually may hinder the employee’s ability to fully understand and comprehend the training being offered to them.
2. Recommendations: Lumiere should implement a loyalty programs and incentives to reward employees of their hard work. With these incentives, employees would appreciate working extra hours, and probably wouldn’t mind spending the extra time to provide quality work if they know they will be rewarded.

With Lumiere switching applications often, employees will have to quickly learn the new system in order to be productive and provide quality work. This may be a challenge for many employees who work virtually. I suggest that Lumiere implement a system (or research the system) that is capable of doing all the required function and can provide a one stop shop for everything that is needed. This way, employees will just be trained on using the one application, thus reducing training time and increasing productivity.