Client Profile.
A global company, with a revenue of over $1 billion, employee strength of 4,000 working from multiple offices and production sites at 15 global locations in the U.S., Europe and China. The company manufactures and sells promotional products as part of its fundraising activities for nonprofits.
Business Need.
With hundreds of resources managing multiple processes supervised by stakeholders from across multiple locations and time zones, and dealing with average weekly volumes of hundreds of orders, the client required a real-time integrated visibility solution to synchronize capabilities and:
- Identify and monitor resource availability
- Ensure optimum productivity per individual team member
- Track task/ order status in real-time
- Increase the efficiency of its processes to minimize order delays
Challenges.
- Order processing and data governance varied for 15+ locations making data consolidation very tricky, as there existed lots of differences across parameter names, values, units, etc.
- Access to resource utilization and performance information lost in data silos creating data accessibility issues, as resource utilization reporting was limited to periodic meetings, and the stakeholders overseeing order management got updates only during these meetings.
- Absence of standardized information management processes, as the information management varied across locations and stakeholders, with varied reporting formats for each level of seniority (project manager, region manager, account manager, etc.)
Solution.
The solution designed was an intuitive dashboard which provided a single source of truth for information across processes enabling:
- Real-time tracking of resources managing order processing and report generation.
- Real-time views on order status per individual resource and report generation.
The solution allowed the client to:
- Track and minimize order delays.
- Get insights and alerts to enable continuous improvements in order processing.
- Prevent work overload and team performance issues (technical, otherwise).
- Identify best performing personnel by optimum productivity and skills.
Approach.
The first step involved identifying the most effective solutions to address the challenges arising from diverse information management, data quality and data consolidation bottlenecks: The approach involved identifying the challenges arising from diverse information management systems and data silos, addressing these challenges and developing solutions to meet defined business objectives.
- Interviewing key stakeholders, shadowing teams and analyzing historical data for different stakeholders across locations.
- Identifying KPIs and coming up with an optimum set of parameters for each process to measure the KPIs.
- Developing a solution to integrate data sources across all processes and storing the data in an optimum data structure allowing for quick calculation of required KPIs with daily and on-demand updates.
- Setting up an automated data cleansing and transformation module to take care of all quality and consolidation issues and making the data ready for processing.
- Developing user portal for visualization and tracking.
