AccuData: Leveraging BPM To Optimize Sales Efficiency

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By Jodi Keller

The phones are ringing off the hook. Customer inquiries are pouring in. You're generating tens of thousands of sales quotes each month. The ideal situation for any business, right? Not if you're an organization with a manual, time-consuming and inefficient quoting process. This case study profiles one company's efforts to streamline its business process around sales count and order workflow. With 30,000 iterations a month, saving time on that aspect of the operation could have a real impact on customer satisfaction and business efficiency.

The Process Challenge

AccuData America is one of the country's largest providers of compiled marketing data and related data analysis solutions. The company, owned by Primis Marketing Group, offers a wide range of direct marketing services and products, including comprehensive lists for telemarketing, direct mail and email campaigns that help organizations to identify new prospects and expand their customer bases. Last year, AccuData began a comprehensive operational efficiency initiative -- building a task force of senior managers and executives who were charged with evaluating key activities throughout the business and identifying those that are manual and inefficient.

After extensive investigation, the team determined that the sales count/order workflow was most in need of improvement. This process -- which was conducted almost 30,000 times each month -- was labor-intensive, highly-repetitive and paper-heavy.

"We needed to streamline the way we handled our counts and quotes," said Monroe Smith, a technical project manager at AccuData. Smith has extensive expertise in process improvement techniques and was picked to oversee the company's productivity enhancement efforts. "It was the process that was the most inefficient, and the one that was wasting the most money each year."

Inquiries would come into AccuData through its customer service team. The rep who fielded the request would manually print out a count/quote request form, fill in the client's criteria and route the hard-copy document to the production department. Production staff would have to re-key the criteria into the database to generate the count results. Results were then printed out, scanned, zipped, filed into the company's document management system and emailed to the client. The entire process took approximately four to five minutes from start to finish, taking up over 2,000 staff-hours monthly.

Building a Solid Business Case for BPM

"Once we identified the processes we needed to improve, we planned to automate them by developing our own applications in-house," Smith stated. "But, I knew I needed to focus my efforts on redesigning those processes, instead of spending hundreds of hours creating development specs. I had come across some information on [business process management, (BPM)] while doing research for another project, and thought it would be a good fit for our needs."

Smith was sure that a BPM solution would be far more effective than custom-programming, but had to build a solid business case to convince the management team. He researched BPM, and closely evaluated several vendors, before selecting a solution he felt confident presenting to management.

"The BPM solution had to be easy-to-use, so non-programmers could design new processes with minimal training," explained Smith. "It also had to integrate with the various tools that are used within our quoting process, including Microsoft Office and the Sharepoint Portal."

Bluespring Software's BPM Suite fit the bill. It provided an intuitive graphical interface for building complex processes. It also included Web services application programming interfaces (APIs) that would allow the BPM application to be integrated with AccuData's existing systems.

Another valuable feature of the Bluespring solution is its ability to incorporate business rules into processes, so activities can be intelligently linked and routed based on certain criteria.

"This was so important to us," said Smith. "Our process can follow multiple paths. For example, if a new member of the production team generates a quote, it needs to be reviewed and approved by a supervisor. A quote generated by an experienced staff member can be sent directly to a client. Or, a sales rep may want to review a quote before it is sent out. Bluespring allows us to build our processes around those rules."

Figure 1: The AccuData order count/workflow process.

Bluespring worked closely with Smith to build a compelling presentation that would prove the value of BPM to the management team. "Bluespring went the extra mile," according to Smith. "They even helped me build a process that mirrored the existing count/quote workflow, so we could demonstrate how the solution would work. The team was so impressed with the concept of BPM, and the Bluespring solution, that they quickly bought into the idea and gave the project the green light."

Also critical to convincing the management team was the ability to re-use the Bluespring solution to improve other processes throughout the company. "We have over 30 business processes that we eventually plan to automate," said Smith. "We can use Bluespring for each and every one of those. If we had gone the custom-programming route, we would have to start from scratch each time."

Automating Count/Quote Workflow

Once Bluespring and Smith completed the installation of the BPM suite on the AccuData test servers, Smith was ready to get started. For the past three months, he has been re-designing the various processes and sub-processes involved in the count/quote workflow, with the help of Bluespring's technical support and professional services teams.

The new process, which will be moved to a full production environment and deployed in the early Fall 2006, is expected to cut several minutes off the time it takes to generate customer quotes by utilizing Web-based forms instead of hard copy ones and automating the way they're completed and routed. Client request forms will be filled in online, then dynamically submitted to the production team's electronic project queue. Requests will be automatically assigned to a production staff member based on workload; or a staff member can "pick up" a project in the queue during down time. The production team will be also able to work off of a dual-screen, which will allow them to refer to the client's initial request as they run the count.

"All printing, writing, re-keying, and scanning will be eliminated. This will make the process far more productive, and enable our staff to get quotes to clients faster," said Smith.

Another benefit the company expects to realize is an increase in the efficiency of the pricing process. Before the Bluespring implementation, sales reps had to generate pricing for orders manually by gathering and re-keying much of the information that was collected during the count/quote process. With the new automated workflow, orders and the pricing required for them can be directly associated with count requests, which will eliminate duplicate work.

Smith has also started work on two more key business processes that were in need of improvement. Using the Bluespring suite, he will be automating account revenue reconciliation, which will help provide the accounting department with a complete audit trail for sales orders, as well as the HR on-boarding process for existing employees who have received promotions or transfers.

What lessons has Smith learned along the way? "Understand and map out your processes before you begin building them in your BPM solution. If you've thought it all out ahead of time -- how the activities will flow and where all the sub-processes fit in -- it can really help speed up the project," he said.

Useful Links

AccuData America
http://www.accudata.com/

Bluespring Software
http://www.bluespringsoftware.com

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