Client Profile.
A global company, with a revenue of over $1 billion, a team of 4,000 working from multiple offices in the U.S., Europe and China. The company manufactures and sells products as part of its fundraising activities for nonprofits, with production sites at 15 global locations.
Business Needs.
With over 100 resources managing 30+ processes supervised by 15 stakeholders across locations, and dealing with an average weekly volume of over 300 orders, the client required a real-time visibility solution to:
- Identify and monitor resource availability and task / order status in real-time.
- Increase the efficiency of its order tracking to minimize order delays.
- Ensure optimum productivity per individual team member.
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: The information management varied across locations and across stakeholders, with varied reporting formats for each level of seniority (project manager, region manager, account manager, etc.).
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:
- Interviewing key stakeholders, shadowing teams and analyzing historical data on order process management for different stakeholders per location.
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 with a user portal to address any issues encountered during incremental data transfer.
Solution.
The solution designed was 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 allows 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.
Developing a dashboard to create a single source of truth to track resource utilization metrics for all managing stakeholders at the level of individual resource per order. This included
- Generation of new analytical reports to manage timely assignment of personnel for each order.
- Generating alerts about delays based on task completion status on orders.
- Giving notifications about resource availability across teams reporting to different managers.
- Automated and insight-driven reporting and customized access to stakeholders across hierarchy depending on user authentication rules.
