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When Royal & Sun Alliance, the major international insurance group, decided to ramp up its capabilities in corporate strategic planning, at both a group and regional level, it utilised the services of two experienced Campion Willcocks Associates.
The challenges of change
The group, one of the UK 's top five insurers, operates successful businesses worldwide. While the company has always undertaken strategic planning, increased competition and tighter margins led to demands for a longer-range approach: to provide a clearer direction and targets against which performance could be measured. Moreover, each region largely undertook its own strategic planning, and varied significantly in approach, timing and quality. The group strategy team, consisting of Strategy Director and Strategy Manager, plus two Strategy Team Advisors from Campion Willcocks, was central in structuring and managing group-wide strategic planning. The value of such an approach lay in achieving a far more fact-based decision-making process, as well as looking cross-region for opportunities.
The programme
Alison Strange, Strategy Team Advisor says, “ The initial six-week assignment was to develop corporate governance capabilities for group and regional planning processes, to improve robustness and ensure business functions were aligned with strategic direction.” This involved aligning functions such as finance, risk and HR with strategy, and developing tools to support governance in the regions. “Myself and Marco Del Carlo, the other Campion Willcocks Associate, were then asked to work on developing group-level strategies, and to help manage the delivery of regional plans from both a process perspective and to help improve their content and quality. This project also had very tight deadlines - by its nature, strategy planning is an intensive process.” The activity covered two main areas.
Management of the global strategic planning process
InIn this area, Strange developed a comprehensive project plan and carried out resource planning then management, to ensure team resources were deployed appropriately.
Research and analysis top support group-wide strategy development
Marco Del Carlo led activity in this area, which had three strands. As Del Carlo explains. “The first, portfolio fill-out, sought to maximise cross-regional synergies by sharing business models and competencies across the Group. The second strand, geographical expansion, involved analyses of 30 countries in which the company didn't currently operate, to explore their feasibility as potential markets. This included looking at sector growth and profitability, the competitive environment, and identifying potential growth drivers. The conclusions, presented to the group of country CEOs, enabled more informed debate and faster decision making as to whether the business should invest in these territories.
“The third strand was ‘organising for success', in which we sought to ensure the organisation supported the strategic direction.
The results
With a well-structured process in place including appropriate governance and formal controls, R&SA's strategic plans were delivered within agreed timelines and with a far higher degree of rigour and analysis than they had previously. “The plans delivered by the regions were described as ‘first class' by group executives and a significant step up from previous years,” says Strange. “The regions found the process very helpful in improving the quality of their plans. We also identified areas where cross-regional support and ideas sharing will help increase the success of plans during implementation.”
The plans delivered by the team are enabling executives to make more informed decisions about the future direction of the company, providing both the structure and direction the group must take in order to implement its plans and meet growth targets.
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