Adjusting To Global Market Dynamics

By M. Isi Eromosele

The change in global is constant and relentless, with ever evolving customer expectations, product time-to-market pressures and competitive rivals in the marketplace. However, small and midsize businesses have two definite advantages over their larger global competitors: nimbleness and agility. With fewer organizational layers and mostly innovative processes, smaller businesses are able to take action faster than their bigger competitors. With small and mid-sized businesses poised to handle marketplace challenges with agility and speed, market changes become opportunities for them to excel.

By creatively combining the Internet and enterprise technologies, small and mid-size companies can expand their global reach, partner in complex deals and respond quickly to dynamic market opportunities. These companies can further increase their competitiveness by instituting efficient operations, which would help them predict and respond to changing market trends and customer demands. Efficient operations will give them the following:

• Visibility – To anticipate change and support long- and short-term competitive strategy
• Speed – To develop and deliver innovative products and services as well as stake out an early-to-market position
• Flexibility – To make fast adjustments in response to changes in market demand
• Scalability – To expand and contract projects, workforce and workload as needed

Flexible, integrated enterprise underpinning technologies would make it easier for these companies to hone the way they do business in response to changing market needs. It would also help them outperform their competitors.

The days when companies could comfortably settle into a predictable market niche, perfect a process that never changes and expect steady business are long gone. In a global economy that is intimately connected by a far flung Internet, no feature of the marketplace stays the same long enough for any degree of comfort. Unpredictable economic shocks and market events across the world can cause cause market fluctuations far greater than seasonal cycles would allow.

Global customers who are looking for the best value for their money and routinely demand better quality, new features, extended services and faster deliveries may turn to competitors in a heartbeat. Constant shift of suppliers is always a concern , while accelerated product life cycles squeeze development time frames, making time to market a critical success factor. Companies have to respond quickly to the changing global market dynamics or risk losing their business to competition.

The fastest way to respond to market change is to anticipate it. To better predict market changes, companies have to look at the big picture within their own organizations. To achieve this, critical business information has to be released from isolated corporate silos and made available to everyone in a more collaborative environment. This would provide accurate market insight, which facilitates great foresight, enabling proper anticipation to rising market demands.

Companies that lack cohesive and streamlined internal operations are ill prepared to respond quickly to market changes. Disconnected functional areas cannot work together efficiently and swiftly. The impact of changing demands cannot work its way through the organization fast enough to make appropriate strategy shift timely possible. To be successful in their respective global markets, these businesses must scale to meet to meet growing demands. Small and mid-sized global businesses must overhaul disconnected , manual and redundant processes and replace them with flexible and efficient integrated business processes. Information technology such as integrated business management systems, acting as underpinning to social media based marketing can also help provide insight to accurately forecast market demands while flexible processes can help these companies adapt quickly in response to global market changes.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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