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Best Practices
Book

Best Practices

Building Your Business with Customer-Focused Solutions

Robert Hiebeler, Thomas B. Kelly and Charles Ketteman
Simon & Schuster, 1998

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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Arthur Andersen executives Robert Hiebeler, Thomas B. Kelly, and Charles Ketteman have brought the company’s "Global Best Practices" program to book format. They tell you how to adapt any company’s best practices to your business. They highlight dozens of examples from the thousands that they have collected for Andersen’s popular database. The authors take a direct, no-frills approach to presenting their ideas and information, and concentrate on case histories that give you plenty of details. This makes the book highly useful, clear, and free of useless jargon, so getAbstract recommends it to people at all levels in any business. You are bound to find some useful gems.

Summary

Identifying Best Practices

In December 1991, international business consulting firm Arthur Andersen created the "Global Best Practices Database," a business-processes classification system. Studying organizations around the world, Arthur Andersen has compiled best practices - the most effective ways to perform particular business practices - from hundreds of companies, totaling 30,000 pages of documented data, which they provide to companies worldwide.

Their classification system draws on the major processes that all businesses share. It includes:

  • Understanding markets and customers.
  • Designing products and services.
  • Marketing and selling products and services.
  • Producing what customers want and need.
  • Delivering products and services.
  • Serving customers.

Andersen asked companies the following questions about customer relationships:

  • What is the best way to respond to customer service issues?
  • How can those requests be met most effectively?
  • What do best-practice companies do to find and train employees to serve customers best?
  • How can a company join with customers to design...

About the Authors

Robert Hiebeler is the managing director of KnowledgeSpace at Arthur Andersen and pioneered the development of the company’s Global Best Practices Knowledge Base. Thomas B. Kelly is the managing partner of Arthur Andersen Knowledge Enterprises, which focuses on electronic commerce and Internet-related knowledge opportunities. He also is managing director of Arthur Andersen operations west of the Rocky Mountains, and a member of the firm’s global management team. Charles Ketteman is the managing partner of Arthur Andersen’s Business Consulting practice.

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