Client is the reputed auto manufacturer in USA and having huge number of locations across country with large manpower.
Challenges
Manually gathering data and building reports was costing many hours per week from the busy schedules of sales managers and operations teams.
Sales-critical information was not getting developed on time as sales managers followed the time-consuming manual process of gathering, combining and converting data into actionable reports.
• More important tasks like strategizing and planning were getting sidelined
• Manual process meant longer reporting cycles
• Due to the lack of a scalable system to create reports, there was duplication of effort in different parts of business
Solution
Our UBS sales Intelligence consultants automated the report building process for the client, freeing up sales leaders’ time for analyzing, decision making and strategizing.
• The solution combines three pieces of information into one report – past performance data, account teams’ forecast data and dynamic data from salesforce.com
• It reads information from a data warehouse and used VBA and other excel capabilities to build customizable reports
• Followed Agile methodology for implementation and rolled out rst version of the tool, reviewed with end user and incorporated feedback in the updated next version
The Business Impact
The real value add for the customer was that the automated process of report generation ensured valuable hours are invested in making sense of data, instead of working on data.
• Speeds up the weekly forecasting process
• Built in performance metrics allow users to make actionable decisions
• Improves productivity by saving hours of manual labor
• The average time to build reports was reduced from a couple of hours to under 10 minutes, freeing up sales resources to do more things with their time
• Scalability of the solution made it possible to have one base solution which then could be used across many parts of the business with minor changes
• Weekly forecast tool is also being used by the Senior Finance people for all the regions in Europe and Canada
