Please use the links below to directly access a particular case study or scroll down to read them all.
Case Study #1 - Customer Survey in the Manufacturing Industry
Case Study #2 - Customer Survey in the Defense Contracting Industry
Case Study #3 - Employee Survey in the Manufacturing Industry
Case Study #4 - Exit Survey in the Professional Services Industry
Case Study #5 - Solutions for a Consulting Firm
Case Study #6 - 360º Leadership Development program in the Baked Goods Industry
Case Study #1
Industry: Manufacturing
Client: Division of a $4 billion company providing circuit protection and power management products designed to protect electrical and electronic systems.
Problem: Client needed to understand the current buying triggers of clients and prospects, and their preferences for various technologies for a variety of applications in a mature market.
Solution: Opinions Incorporated designed a customized market study composed of both focus groups and custom designed surveys of customers and prospects.
Result: Client received answers to the following strategic questions:
- What are the Key Decision Drivers for our customers when selecting a supplier?
- What are the Key Decision Drivers when selecting an over current protection device?
- What are the advantages of our technology vs. competitive technology?
- What does the customer desire in new circuit protection technology?
- Do customers have a preference for a specific product technology?
- What are the trends in applying these products?
- How do we perform relative to the competition?
- Who are considered top suppliers in our industry?
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Case Study #2
Industry: Defense Contracting
Client: Division of a 16.6 billion dollar company that is a leading supplier of sophisticated defense systems to the United States and its allies.
Problem: Client needed to confirm and better understand what their customers desired in a best-in-class systems contractor so that they could align with customer needs and gain more systems contractor awards. Client also needed to understand how much “buy-in” for change they had from their employees and management.
Solution: Opinions Incorporated designed a survey to work in concert with the core concepts put forth in a book titled “The Discipline of Market Leaders”, by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema. We measured both employee and customer perspectives. The analysis was structured to speak directly to the questions raised and opportunities discussed by Treacy and Wiersema.
Result: Opinions Incorporated answered the following strategic questions:
- How would customers describe the operating model of a best-in-class systems contractor?
- What is the most valued aspect of a best-in-class systems contractor?
- Are executive perceptions in sync with customer priorities?
- Will our managers engage in a new operating model?
- Will our workforce engage in a new operating model?
- Do our business units have different perspectives on what the customer values?
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Case Study #3
Industry: Manufacturing
Client: A $10 Billion Fortune 200 global multi-industry company with market leading brands and businesses serving the general aviation, aerospace, and defense, industrial and commercial finance markets
Problem: Management learned that there was a unionization campaign underway at one of their plants and they wanted to learn what issues might be contributing to employee concerns. There was an existing survey program in place within the company but this plant was not scheduled for a survey in the immediate future.
Solution: We received their call on a Thursday. We printed their survey that day and arrived on-site that Friday to administer the survey. We were able to process the data over the weekend and had results and recommendations back to upper management by Monday.
Result: Due to the fact that we provided them with quick and accurate information they were able to address the employees issues and avoid unionization at this facility.
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Case Study #4
Client: Auditing Firm with distributed workforce
Problem: Average turnover of 45 skilled professional employees per year with an average annual salary of $77K, costing the company an estimated $3.5 Million per year. The company did not know what factors were contributing to this turnover and/or what to do to fix the problem.
The client told us they needed to:
- Create an exit survey program that would provide the insights necessary to reduce turnover.
- Accelerate the planned initiatives to create a new supportive culture.
- Enhance accountability in the supervision of the field employees and support the changes in the recruitment and retentions processes being implemented.
- Identify opportunities for leadership development.
- Identify attributes that contributed to or detracted from successful relationships between clients and auditing personnel
Solution: A flexible on-line exit survey solution available to employees from any location and real-time reporting which provides these capabilities. The solution we provided gives the exiting employees control over the level of confidentiality of their responses, encouraging frank and useful feedback.
Result: In its first year of operation this program helped our client reduce employee turnover from 18% to 15% per year, or 8 employees retained per year which translated to an annual savings of approximately $600,000.
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Case Study #5
Client: Regional Consulting Firm
Problem: The consulting firm was being approached by clients to conduct surveys that were larger than they had the capability of handling in-house. They did not want to turn down these business opportunities, nor did they want to risk compromising the quality of the services they provided to their clients.
Solution: Opinions Incorporated discreetly outsourced the design, logistics and analysis of the survey in a timely manner allowing the consultant to remain the primary client contact.
Result: The consulting firm has been able to attract and retain more business through this strategic partnership and improve the quality of the deliverables they provide to their clients.
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Case Study #6
Client: A Large Producer of Baked Goods
Problem: The client was spending a lot of money on leadership development training, but were concerned that they were not maximizing the return on this investment because they couldn’t identify the best possible candidates for this program.
They told us they needed…a process that would provide confidential feedback from supervisors, peers and subordinates of individual managers, identifying their strengths and weaknesses. The solution had to be able to work both for respondents who had on-line access and for those who did not.
Solution: Opinions Incorporated provided these capabilities through a custom developed 360 multi-rater questionnaire that included questions to assess all of the core competencies included in their leadership development program.
Result: The client was able to identify both good candidates for the leadership development program and also several individual managers who had undesirable behaviors that negatively impacted the organization and give them direction for specific training.
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