|
A "Fortune 5 Industrial Equipment"
Company had an initiative to automate
the complex proposal process for
its field services team that performed
maintenance on many configurations
of turbines. The process involved
variety complex key modules from
configuration of the turbine,
scoping of work, scheduling (resource
and gantt chart), job cost estimating,
and finally document generation
(pdf or word) to submit to the
customer.
Business Benefits:
The metrics in place was to
reduce head count of the manual
process, significantly reduce
time to delivery of the proposal
from weeks to hours/days, and
maintain a standard over the
proposal process.
Challenges:
The mandate was for
a 12 month project and 9 months
had passed with another vendor
without any successful results.
Thus, Core Concept's solution
using the Orchestra platform
and Concert solution was considered,
with only three months remaining
in the project. Another challenge
was to develop a expandable
platform so that once the field
services initiative was fulfilled
many other business units within
the company with different complex
processes could easily integrate
using the similar modules, but
also able to easily develop
the different modules and plug
into the existing proposal automation
platform. Finally, the solution
had to be built so that the
business owner could actually
grow the application or change
the application without heavy
dependency on the development
team, since the business environment
is constantly changing and proposal
automation needs to be flexible.
Outcome:
Core Concept, Inc. successfully
implemented the proposal automation
solution surpassing time constraints
as well as expanding beyond
the one business unit. The proposal
time was reduced from 21 days
to 2 days. Head count was reduced
by 90% and usage was about 1000
users globally. After field
services initiative, the client
expanded into four other business
units within 2 month time for
each on the Orchestra platform
expanding usage of the total
proposal automation solution
to 2500 users globally. Each
business unit came with 1000's
of different product configurations/rules
and 1800 pages of product ordering
guide, and the Orchestra rule
engine was able to accommodate
for the variety and complexities
of the business rules. The business
owner was also given the ability
to create work scopes, document
templates, configure the job
cost estimate, create the rules
and formulas for different product
configuration, as well as change
the actual application pages
that were used by the end user
for proposal creation through
an easy user interface and modeling
environment. This flexibility
allowed the business owner to
change the application seamlessly
without any interaction from
the development team, and currently
the solution is maintained wholly
by the business owner in terms
of month to month changes in
proposals, rates, scope of work,
and other business policies.
|
