eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Internal operations and processes are seen as primary means to answer organizational challenges as saturated markets have limited the external expansion strategies. Yet, today, ever increasing need to tighten up on investments and reconsider operational activities has brought the scope from running processes toward efficiency thinking and rationalization of these internal practices. In marketing and sales (M&S) context, these considerations have obtained even greater attention since organizations and their marketing functions are forced to cut down on their considerable investments and realize new process improvement strategies to create savings.

The foremost purpose of this paper is to design a process framework that acknowledges process rationalization and improvement practices and yet establishes these considerations in case organization – PR-Logisticar Oy – specific M&S context. The extant process management and marketing literature provides different useful process models for internal operations; however, author has not discovered any comprehensive process framework that would suit case organizational needs. For instance, process implementation and assessment stages are not separated in plethora of process models and this results in the need for more multifaceted process framework. In this sense, 3-phase process framework comprising planning and design, implementation, and assessment stages has been established to cover particular case organizational and wider company and industry independent needs.

This study has been carried out as a case study where solution sales and B2B context along with M&S operations are further examined for framework creation. Interviews (conducted 01.03. – 31.05.2010), direct observations, participant-observation and numerical analyses provided relevant information on case organization’s current objective setting and indicated process related inefficiency areas. Rationalization practices, and calculated possible cost and time savings underlying current M&S process were established to offer information on achievable process improvement results. Small adjustments to current M&S process indicated remarkable cost savings as much as approx. 20.800 € or 31.200 € for year-end objectives for 10 business analyses (BAs) or 3 business projects, respectively. Similarly, time savings accounted for 370 or 554 working hours depending on objective setting, respectively.

Designed framework was further modified and applied to case company, and implemented as a steering tool. Empirical evidence showed rather encouraging results of the applicability of this (M&S) process framework as it streamlined the original M&S process and provided some visible assistance for process lead-through. Framework as such provides organization a possibility to better utilize and allocate resources and enables managers to behold through initially complicated process. However, actual savings resulting from implementing such a model are difficult to calculate and are identified only afterwards. Besides, organization wide framework utilization demands managerial support and example of using such a process framework.