Client Situation
Our client is based in Dubai and is a lead advisory group and property manager in the UAE hospitality industry. The client’s subsidiary manages end-to-end planning, design, and construction of complex hospitality, leisure, and real estate projects. The client had planned to perform a thorough evaluation of its strategy and operations across the group and company levels to identify and correct all business inefficiencies.
Cedar’s Approach
The primary objective of this program was to assist the client in conducting a diagnostic of its business and operations for strategic and operational improvement. Cedar’s approach was as follows:
- Holistic evaluation of the company by reviewing internal documentation, performing qualitative and quantitative interviews with 20 senior executives
- Assessment of strategic, financial, product & service sales, client, process, organizational and IT performance data
- Collection and review of secondary data for a sector outlook, to set benchmarks, and identify and evaluate key competitors
- 3-5 primary meetings with key competitors and clients
- Integration and analysis of all collected inputs
- Formulation of a way-forward strategy
- Presentation of findings and recommendations to senior management
Outcome
Some of the key outcomes of this program were as follows:
- GCC tourism, hospitality and foodservice sector overviews to develop critical insights such as the sector CAGRs, expected investments in sector-specific projects, etc
- Detailed customer analytics to develop consumer insights such as top clients, sales from repeat clients, proposal conversion ratios, etc
- Presentation of 22 key recommendations across strategic and operational areas such as:
- Re-alignment of billing rate per employee or re-evaluation of roles
- Introduction of active lead generation through defined sales and marketing plans
- Administration of MIS for proposal pipeline reports, staffing sheets, resource availability plans, resource utilization plans, invoicing and collections reports
- Re-alignment of job descriptions and key performance indicators for employees & development of an initiative prioritization framework based on business criticality and implementation effort
- Definition of crucial success factors for ensuring business growth such as:
- Focus on business development with higher involvement of senior management
- Communication of value to clients, on both proposals and deliverables
- Tracking of internal billing and utilization to assess project profitability