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B2B Approaches for Different Economic Cycles 139

Strategic, nontraditional approaches

While the nature of most strategic nontraditional approaches
is mid- to long-term in payback time frames, they can easily
be executed to deliver short-term cost reduction and avoid-
ance impact.

Work Value

Work Value is a strategic approach to optimizing the time
associates spend at the task commensurate with their level
of compensation. This approach is typically used to increase
the time a person spends adding value at the level at which
they were hired to add value. This approach can be used
to create both long-term and short-term cost efficiencies. The
objective is to understand how your product or service can
increase the time your customers and employees expend on
task at an appropriate work level.

For example, how does your product or service allow the
director of marketing to spend more time on marketing strat-
egy than on administrative type functions? In the Work Value
approach, not only do you get cost efficiencies by allowing
a high powered director to spend more time doing higher
skilled work rather than performing lower skilled work which
could be done by a significantly less compensated employee.
The other dimension of this is that the business will ultim-
ately end up developing better marketing programs.

To take an example: An automotive tools manufacturer
has a value proposition that helps shift manufacturer workers
to higher value positions. There are tools to reduce manu-
facturing preparation and checking positions, e.g. tool setting,
or quality measurement, so those people can be reallocated
to higher value positions, e.g. machine operators, machine
programmers. This is part of their value proposition of cre-
ating a consistently high-quality product. This Work Value
approach is in parallel to a cost of quality advantage as well.