Case Study: Order to Cash Transformation Cuts Fulfillment Time by 20%

Opportunity.

Our client was trying to accelerate the delivery of their enterprise-customer solutions. This would benefit their customers and would allow our client to realize revenue from their sales much faster than before. Our client delivers complex financial services solutions to hundreds of multinational customers. Each sale requires a combination of customized hardware, software, network configuration, new data interfaces, security, and customized reporting and analytics. The customer roll-out plans require that the new solution must be activated for thousands of customer locations at once. Each solution must comply with some of the strictest privacy and data security regulations in the world and requires coordination of hundreds of personnel on both sides. It is no surprise that each one of these sales took 12 months to implement. Cove Hill Consulting was hired to shave three months off each implementation.  Each new customer would be able to go-live faster and our client could recognize millions of dollars of additional revenue within the current fiscal year.

Approach.

Cove Hill brought in a small team of consultants to analyze the entire process, including each one of the hundreds of process steps, inter-departmental and customer hand-offs, bottlenecks and backlogs. We organized teams of dozens of client resources to work with us as we redesigned the overall implementation workflow. We designed an overarching plan to ensure the effort of each team would deliver their target results on time and fit into a cohesive whole. Our consultants reimagined the process and led representatives from a dozen business functions through workshops that cut out time and effort from each step without sacrificing quality. We ensured the new process had proper controls as well as provided transparency to others up and down the work chain. Cove Hill collaborated with end users to design a new, unified user experience on a single technology platform that brought the customer into relevant interactions. This promoted customer engagement and responsiveness, and improved collaboration and the flow of information to further accelerate the process.

Results.

The redesigned process and technology solution shortened the Order to Cash timeline by nearly three months. This was a win-win for our client and their customers as it brought significant revenue into the current fiscal year and improved customer satisfaction, too. The single technology platform and common user experience reduced risk and complexity, while providing greater transparency and lower cost of delivery. Additionally, the real-time visibility of deal and fulfillment progress has led to a better allocation of work across the enterprise. Our client now continues to refine and enhance the process to achieve even greater efficiency and uses it as a model for other business divisions.