The Client

Client was the largest sales performance company in the world that provided a suite of resources to assist sales and other revenue leaders drive growth. 

The Challenge

Our client manually managed their sales order process inconsistently across several global legacy applications with a highly complex product catalogue. We were tasked to improve operational performance, data accuracy and reduce cost through system consolidation and CRM to ERP application integration.

With multiple systems in production and undocumented manual processes, our client’s existing solution was difficult to scale and improve. Monthly revenue recognition, invoicing and cash collection were negatively impacted as a result.

The Opportunity

The cumulative costs of the CRM, ERP and labor for these specific transactions were analyzed and further decomposed to understand the cost of ownership for each order processed. The chart below highlights business process components to reduce these costs by 57%:

The second chart illustrates the measurable difference our client realized in order processing time, as represented above in the cost reduction from $21,200 per month to $6,600 per month in Labor:

Note:  the ERP Installation on its own created a slight increase in processing time for the Operations teams, because full Sales Order data was being gathered and input into the system.  Previously, basic Invoice data was being gathered and Accounting was manually processing revenue recognition and invoice billing schedules on a monthly basis.  The new ERP allowed for Operations resources to identify the appropriate Item, which automatically generated the approved revenue recognition and invoice schedules.  Thus, Operations resource’s time was increased slightly but Accounting resource time was decreased significantly, creating an overall benefit to the client.

The Outcome

With the collapse of enterprise applications and application integration, our client realized a 57% decrease in the cost of processing a sales order which included a 35% increase in productivity for their operations team (a client-facing, billable team).

In addition to cost reduction and productivity increases, the client was able to eliminate error-prone manual processes, increase invoice accuracy, and accelerate revenue recognition.