While executives have always tried to use myriad analytical tools to drive operational decision-making, the scope of the task at hand – marshalling corporate resources in pursuit of revenues and profitability – often boils down to a single critical issue: how well are customers being serviced by the company’s different operational groups. Regardless of the industry, product, or service being offered, customer-facing operations in sales, service, and manufacturing, among others, must be attuned to the needs of former, existing, and future customers. Successful customer-centric operations are a key component to growth and shareholder value, while a failure to optimize these operations leaves companies at a distinct disadvantage.
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Real Estate Performance Management:
Realizing the Value of an Enterprise Approach to Corporate Real Estate

Introduction
Real estate management often lags well behind the rest of the enterprise when it comes to using automation and technology in order to achieve cost-controls, optimize the management of the real estate portfolio, and maximize revenue opportunities. Yet real estate can represent one of the single largest assets and/or liabilities in a company’s capital portfolio, and the annual spending on real estate and related services can account for anywhere from two to more than ten percent of total revenue.

Real estate is also one of the more dynamic parts of the business: Even for companies that don’t consider themselves directly in the real estate industry, buying and selling real estate can be an essential part of an overall corporate strategy. This is a well-known phenomenon in the retail world, where acquisitions of hundreds and even thousands of new properties per year is commonplace. It is also the case in virtually every other industrial or service sector, however: research shows that the acquisition and disposition of real estate are on-going activities for all industry types, and can account for an annual churn that can easily exceed hundreds of properties and tens of millions of dollars per company..
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Realtime Asset Management for Railroad Freight:
The RFTrax Opportunity

Executive Summary
The railroad industry is now at a crossroads that impacts not just the railroad operators, but also the manufacturers and shippers that depend on rail transportation to deliver spare parts and finished goods across the continent. The renaissance of the railroad as a key element in the freight transportation infrastructure has highlighted the need to better manage the transportation of goods by rail. At issue is an on-going problem: The state-of-the-art in tracking and managing key rolling assets – railcars, tankers, and locomotives – lags far behind other highly capitalized, mission-critical industries. Loss and damage as a percent of revenue have remained largely unchanged in the industry in 20 years, while just-in-time requirements have significantly increased the number of freight cars in use, even as overall dwell times have gone up for most operators. Security is another concern...
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Return on Investment for Composite Applications
and Service Oriented Architectures:
A Model for Financial Success and Enterprise Efficiency

Executive Summary
Service oriented architectures and composite applications hold out the promise for a brave new world of applications development, deployment, and reuse that many proponents believe will usher in unprecedented levels of return on investment (ROI) for a domain that has long suffered from cost overruns and excessive, often unjustified expenditures. The ability to lower the cost of integration while improving the leveragability of key software and business process assets are only a few of the reasons why the ROI of service-oriented architectures and composite applications is thought to herald a new economic reality for IT and business development. Ease of use and lower training costs, lower cost of deployment, faster time to market, improved business requirement matching, and better multi-channel deployment are among the myriad reasons these technologies are so eagerly awaited by business and IT managers alike.....
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Rethinking TCO:
Towards a More Viable and Useful Measure of IT Costs

Executive Summary
Despite its widespread use in the enterprise software market, total cost of ownership (TCO) is a troubled measure with a troubled past. Early academic studies on TCO in materials procurement, and later research by leading industry analyst firms on desktop cost of ownership, had serious flaws and problems with their accuracy and reliability. The early problems, though acknowledged by the academic research community, were largely swept under the rug as TCO emerged, particularly in the enterprise software market, as a “must-have” statistical measure for buying decisions....
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