Business Analysis

Throughout our analysis, we continue to apply this test – how does a given activity contribute to the enterprise? With this as a guidepost, it becomes much easier to identify high-value opportunities for change. Can a particular activity be done faster? With fewer resources? Is it possible to alter the way in which the activity is performed, in order to enhance the output? Can we link two activities together to streamline both and produce a greater whole?

Roughly half of Ventera’s projects are significant Business Analysis efforts. Among the others, we often conduct some form of Business Analysis – for example, in order to ensure that any IT solution we propose, or are asked to implement, will provide the customer with the expected benefits. About half of our staff are trained as Business Analysts, or BAs. Our BAs have a deep understanding of the business needs and issues faced by our customers and their industry.

One example of this is with Sprint Nextel. Ventera has been a trusted IT solutions partner with Nextel since 1996, and now Sprint Nextel, since the merger in 2005. On more than a dozen initiatives, Ventera has worked directly with Sprint Nextel business managers to understand their business issues, gather user requirements, and develop solutions to improve their business operations, as described below:

• Ventera provided analytical and development services in support of a $1B project to sell Sprint Nextel’s cellular towers. Ventera developed an innovative process for conducting field audits of the 700 tower sites, and developed a sophisticated query-reporting tool that allowed Sprint Nextel to provide extremely detailed and accurate information. Ultimately, Ventera’s work enabled Sprint Nextel to sell the tower assets for hundreds of millions more than they had anticipated.
• As part of a major new business initiative, Sprint Nextel asked Ventera to assess the current business processes and technologies that were likely to be affected by the initiative, and make recommendations for how they might need to be changed.
• Ventera supported Sprint Nextel on a project to track the acquisition of wireless spectrum. In the initial phase of this project Ventera executed a comprehensive review of the organizations, processes, and technologies that support Sprint Nextel’s acquisition process. Ventera implemented a system to track acquisition activities, which helped Sprint Nextel become more efficient in completing the deals and also gain greater financial control of the company’s accelerating growth. As part of this project Ventera also enhanced operational efficiency by implementing processes that eliminated duplicate data entry, and allowed users to conduct bulk loading of data.
• Sprint Nextel recently asked Ventera to analyze their process for network retuning, and set a goal of reducing what is currently a 90-day process to 30 days.
• Ventera’s understanding of Sprint Nextel operations allowed us to redesign an existing legacy system that identified available frequencies. The redesign resulted in a dramatic reduction in processing time. In many cases the reduction was more than 90%.

Ventera has also performed extensive business analysis for a major Division of one of the world’s largest financial services firms. During 2004 Ventera led an integrated analysis of the Division’s business operations, across the individual business units. We conducted collaborative brainstorming sessions and created business diagrams and process flows to provide a common basis for discussions and analysis. Ventera worked with Division experts to develop a list of 14 high-level recommendations, subsequently broken out into 40 detailed recommendations. For each recommendation, Ventera identified the potential benefits, as well as implementation issues and challenges, and presented these in a final report to the Division’s executive leadership.

Taken as a group, these recommendations enable the enterprise to:

• Standardize and leverage data for better management and operations.
• Improve customer satisfaction by becoming more customer-friendly.
• Increase revenue through cross-selling.
• Improve business performance by instituting more effective controls and risk management.
• Decrease operational costs by eliminating redundant processes and activities of marginal value.

Today, Ventera is acting on one of the selected recommendations – leading an initiative to centralize all of the Division’s equity financial management functions. Ventera is conducting a detailed business operations analysis of the financial management activities of the business units to:

• Extract financial management activities to place into a centralized organization.
• Identify opportunities to automate manual processes.
• Eliminate or improve low-value activities.
• Eliminate redundant activities between organizations.
• Standardize data definitions.

Ventera has a long, successful history of helping our customers improve their business operations, and, as a result, reducing costs, increasing revenue, and simply performing better.