The sample projects in this section are being highlighted because they occur across different industries and business capability areas. Industries include telecom/wireless, healthcare, insurance and security products. A range of consulting services were involved including launch strategy, process improvement, IT systems integration, project management, change management, etc.
Please click on the tabs on the left to navigate across the various projects highlighted.
Industry: Software
The client was in the process of releasing a suite of new enterprise products (cloud & mobile software) to the market in which the typical sale was measured in the millions of dollars. Management wanted to find creative ways to help enterprise sales teams present the business benefits for these products to potential customers. One of these techniques was the concept of a Business Value Model (an Excel spreadsheet based tool) which a salesperson could customize (using configurable customer-specific parameters) during an enterprise customer meeting to calculate and display the quantitative benefits of deployment. The tool was to be designed to help the enterprise customer picture the benefits (ROI, NPV, etc.) of switching to the client’s product stack and participate in the evolutionary roadmap of these tools as new functionality was added over time.
The challenge was to build a spreadsheet (a Business Value Model) based on a set of product scenarios which could be quickly customized by a salesperson to help customers understand the long term business value of purchasing to these products. The completed tool would have the capability to compute the cost and ROI for such a purchase. It would also quantify business value for the customer in the areas of new revenue and productivity. The Model would also include conservative, realistic and optimistic views of potential benefits.
Based on industry research, we identified functional capabilities (for products), transformational levers (based on industry use cases) and associated KPIs (with quantifiable benefits). This enabled the build out of various scenarios (conservative, realistic and optimistic) which could be triggered based on settings available to the sales person, generating quantifiable benefits which could be shared with the potential customer.
The completed tool was released to the sales organization for testing and adoption in combination with other product information to support sales meetings. Additional tweaks were made over time to support changes to internal products, dates of release and new data on quantitative benefits before release.
Industry: Telecom/Wireless
The client was experiencing significant customer churn and had created a business case to upgrade existing CRM systems at all their data centers to enable their call center representatives (CSRs) to offer incentives to customers most likely to consider canceling their service.
The first challenge was to build a predictive system capable of identifying customers most likely to cancel service as well as ranking customers on a high to low value scale. This information would then be matched up with a set of progressively more compelling incentives to persuade high value customers to stay on and if appropriate, accept a new contract.
Existing legacy systems would need to be modernized to handle these new capabilities and every CSR would need access via their desktops in order to be able to manage each customer conversation.
We co-managed the digital transformation of the legacy CRM platform and led a 150-person team through the software development lifecycle to build capabilities including customer segmentation, preference management, targeted offers, fulfillment, disposition tracking and reporting. In the process, we worked with geographically distributed teams, managing budgets, schedules, risks, etc. while ensuring a smooth flow of information, status and a few cases in which executive intervention was needed to mitigate risks and ensure that all goals were met.
The successful test and launch of the platform enabled the client to launch the service nationwide and to start collecting data and measuring business results. As a consequence of the platform, they were able to successfully meet their goal of reversing customer churn and generate new customer joins using the new system, which continued to evolve through further phases of modernization and utilization of emerging technologies.
Industry: Healthcare
The client had created a business initiative to enter a new line of business, necessitating changes to their existing claims system (business rules, coverage, benefits, etc.). These changes had to be supported by a new web interface for customers to log in, initialize accounts, select benefits/coverage and set up payment plans. For the client, this was a new source of revenue and their first entry to this particular market (customer segment). It was therefore, important to them to have an issue-free market launch, which would require not just all systems to be fully functional and tested, but also an operations team which was properly trained in the necessary processes to serve customer calls on Day 1.
Since this was the first entry to a new market segment, there were a significant number of changes required to legacy systems and web interfaces. New business processes were needed to support new categories of health coverage including new customer types, benefits and costs. The claims system needed an upgrade to support these new requirements and a new eCommerce system had to be built to support this particular market segment, payments, customer feedback/complaints, etc. All these changes had to be tested in time to meet market launch schedule commitments to support dates communicated to customers for sign ups via the eCommerce system.
We helped manage multiple sequential upgrades to the legacy claims system and worked with an Agile/Scrum team working on the e-Commerce frontend. We also introduced new tools/metrics for business reporting, risk management/contingency planning and project tracking.
The system launched on time and under budget. The client was able to onboard several thousand new customers, putting their business plan in motion by generating new revenues and profits for the company.
Industry: Security product manufacturing
Our client was engaged in the market launch of a new product (hardware and software) to client locations across the country. Each location had multiple users (in the hundreds/thousands) and varying levels of complexity associated with product distribution, training (trainers and users), user schedules, fulfillment and other activities. As a result of the complexity, budget and schedule concerns had crept into the picture, with the potential to disrupt the profits planned for the rollout.
The complexity inherent to the ramifications of a large scale geographic rollout of the product was projected to cause budget overruns, eating into profits. This was unacceptable to the client. We were engaged to analyze and shed light on the various sources of runaway costs and identify solutions which could help mitigate overages.
We collected data on launch schedule & drivers, business processes and resources being leveraged, activities at each site associated with training and fulfillment as well as other associated cost sources to gain a better understanding of the situation. We built a formal process model framework with the client’s help. We then conducted an analysis and researched best practice solutions which helped us assemble a portfolio of recommended changes by process area. This work ultimately fed into a set of recommendations for the client to consider for cost reduction and budget conservation.
The study helped the client gain new perspectives on the sources of costs and enabled them to make adjustments to their existing plans, resulting in a set of cost savings which met their needs. The process analysis also enabled them to create a list of items for a longer term strategy around process improvement and cost reduction.
