CLIENT RESULTS
20% OF REVENUES AT RISK
THE OPPORTUNITY
A 5-yr contract with their largest customer - representing 20% of revenues - was up for bid within a year.
A revenue loss of this magnitude would likely cause a domino effect of
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layoffs
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equipment and real estate investments left dormant
Market intel shows the need to reduce operational costs by $2,500,000 annually to bid competitively
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100 employees deliver products and services to this customer
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16% Employee Attrition rate
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Repeated Customer issues (85% not resolved first time)
SOLUTION TIMELINE
Weeks 1-6
Action taken by the business: Analyze Financials
Results:
Uncovered $700,000 through itemized budget cuts
Did not analyze the future impact to employees and operational capabilities
Could not with confidence provide a competitive bid with revised financials
Week 6
The Line of Business VP approached me to help.
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Weeks 7-8
My Approach:
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Learned Customer wants and needs and current issues
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Evaluated current line of business org structure
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Assessed end-to-end delivery process across departments to uncover opportunities – the overwhelming majority of which were unknown to management.
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Promised a solution in six weeks to provide $2,500,000 in savings without budget cuts in time for contract bid.
Weeks 9-12
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Designed the line of business to eliminate departmental siloes - dedicated experts to the delivery workflow team.
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Engineered the end-to-end process for maximum value delivery and efficiency
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Eliminated entire rework process
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Added two fields in CRM to capture root cause of product and service process failures.
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Nine Employees were re-located to other understaffed areas of the business allowing for nine positions (hiring requisitions) to be cancelled in IT and Operations
Weeks 9-40
Allowed attrition to continue until the new delivery process was staffed to 80 employees (took 8 months as attrition slowed with the new business structure and process).
RESULTS
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Customer thrilled with new process
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Employees empowered
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$2,500,000 in annual savings achieved in 8 months
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Won a new 5-yr Contract
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20% of Revenues retained
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Complaints reduced by 20% within 2 weeks and continued to plumet
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97% of issues solved real-time starting Day 1
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Backlog of issues cleared within 6 months
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1 Workflow System retired
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Delivery process right-sized
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TESTIMONIAL - WEEK 1
In the old world, we were not encouraged to communicate to other departments. Customer issues were thrown over the wall (and back) in a separate workflow system with minimal interaction, little to no knowledge-transfer, and limited understanding of root cause.
I was delighted to witness a conversation between a Customer Service Representative (CSR) and two other experts (previously in different departments) on launch day. The experts responded to her issue, saying that everything had proceeded correctly based on procedure.
The CSR shared that an important processing step had been omitted from the desk level procedure.
As a direct result of sharing of information, the link is being incorporated so that we can 'get it right the first time'. That procedure has been incorrect for years!
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As we gathered new root cause codes in the system during the first week, four system algorithms were found to be incorrectly coded.
We had the right team now to correct them immediately, and customer issues began to dwindle. We have time and manpower now to work the backlog.
Outstanding Teamwork! Outstanding Customer Focus!
- Darrel R., Supervisor, Operations
NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PIVOTAL TO STARTUP SUCCESS
THE OPPORTUNITY
A venture capital firm merged four small healthcare analytic and disease management organizations to form a new startup comprised of roughly 150 employees.
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At the core of this vision was a new product development project to create an end-to-end system using multiple technology platforms. This would allow the company to better predict which individuals of an insured population needed help managing their chronic diseases (diabetes, COPD, chronic heart failure, etc.).
The vision was to not only improve the quality of life for those individuals identified, but to offer these services at a premium to health insurance companies who would save billions of dollars in avoidable claims annually.
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Technology development had already begun with the offshore vendor without clarity of architecture, process, or an understanding of the complete functionality of the system.
Six months since its inception, this pivotal project was already $3M over budget and 6 months behind schedule.
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I was brought in to bring the project on track.
The company needed to successfully pull this off, or investors would lose everything - all $13 Million budgeted to stand up the company.
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I was cast into a two-day meeting without introduction on my first day by the CQO. I listened to unguided conversations from five leaders, each a brilliant expert in their field, for four hours. The team broke for lunch, frustrated that they were no closer to gaining clarity than at the start of the day.
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Each expert was speaking a different language.
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I approached the CIO and offered recommendations as to how I could get the team on track. "Let’s create a universal language - a process that would define everything that we needed to implement."
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He was frustrated enough to accept my proposal and I was confident enough to offer it.
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My first advice to him was that we needed to slow down to speed up.
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That afternoon, I began to lead the team to define the process they were trying to create, mapping their vision - people, process, technology, data. Being new to this information, and with years of experience in bringing order to tech projects, my questions uncovered many hidden assumptions. We began to gain clarity of how each experts vision tied together.
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The team began to collaborate as they began to understand how each piece fit together. By late afternoon, department leaders had joined me up front as we covered an entire wall from floor to reachable height with process definition, which was also serving as a functional specification.
I stepped aside late in the day and facilitated from the back of the room. They had learned to fish.
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The next day we were able to dial in technical and data requirements across the process. The leader responsible for data architecture across the platform approached me at the end of the day. He was elated and relieved now that he could finally define what his team needed to accomplish.
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The CIO thanked me for my contribution, and the company retained me for eight months to continue guiding them. I worked across departments assuring that gaps between process and technology were addressed.
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RESULTS
That cornerstone project completed on time and on budget at a total spend of $13M.
A new company was born, and 15 years later that company continues to be successful.
FROM STRUGGLING TO SUCCESSFUL STARTUP
THE OPPORTUNITY
A Healthcare Services startup with 30 employees was suffering from a very high employee turnover rate problems with quality delivery, and disappointing sales.
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They had also burned through all their seed money.
They had tried multiple business models, adjusted their offerings, and nothing seemed to help improve the delivery of their products and services.
A former colleague of mine had joined the organization in a CPO capacity and engaged me with the leadership team. She knew morale was at a all time low.
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THE SOLUTION
First, we stopped the bleeding by improving evaluating and redesigning the end-to-end delivery process.
Next, we led the Leadership team through the implementation of the Design2Scale System so that they could learn and apply proven approaches to sustain the gains and continue to align, scale, and grow.
While participating, Leadership adjusted their marketing content and realigned the business to deliver on their value proposition.
Now they are acquiring new accounts regularly and can consistently deliver the value they promise with 20% productivity gain.
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TESTIMONIAL
“You've made a believer out of me! I am so impressed by how well this model works!
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As we create new solutions, we design our organization and process FIRST and test before implementing. This has saved our company and our clients time and money and has enabled the scaling up of our organization.
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Now, we slow down to speed up and the value is unparalleled.”
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- Michael Bonanno, Chairman & CEO, Virtual Support Systems
DOUBLED REVENUES IN 12 MONTHS
THE OPPORTUNITY
A fast-growing healthcare analytics company, a leader in their marketplace, was projecting to double in size from 1,800 to 3,600 employees in 18 months.
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Their 2nd largest customer revenues of $40 Million per year were remarkable, and yet this customer was not overly impressed with the company’s performance and was planning to allow contracts to run out.
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The analytics company’s answer to this problem was to build out dedicated a 350-employee business unit for that customer.
I was commissioned to turnaround the customer relationship and make the business unit successful.
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THE SOLUTION
Over 12 months, I led the business unit executive team to engage experts across the organization to solve 300 long-standing customer issues.
I taught teams best practices - Project Portfolio Management, Project Management, Root Cause Analysis, and how to create viable process & procedure.
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I advised them how to develop quality and operational systems that allowed us to implement a new program and go live without issue for the first time in company history.
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THE RESULT
Instead of the normal major issues and chaos experienced with each new program implementation, this new approach so impressed our customer that over the next few months they invested in two new programs, boosting business unit revenues from $40 million to $80 million.
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My vision was to replicate this system across the entire company with the potential of increasing company-wide revenue by $200 million or more while requiring less employees than projected.
THE DANGER OF "WE'VE ALWAYS DONE IT THIS WAY"
Company-wide Executives were so confident that their longstanding reliance on the experts they hired was more important then designing the company to win. They chose to keep running the remainder of the company the way they always had.
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As our new business unit was winning contracts, the company lost its largest customer.
The result?
The company chose to lay off 50% of the workforce - those they had hired in the last 18 months - in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
My contract was severed to support budget cuts.
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Not only did choosing to stick with weak and outdated business practices have a devastating impact on many families, but the company also never came close to achieving that level of success ever again and eventually failed.