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Case Study# 6
Corporate Information
The Phone Company provides telecommunications services, network design, and systems
integration for large businesses.
Existing Business Processes
The Phone Company is currently evaluating its business processes for the collection, updating,
and matching of curriculum vitaes (CVs) in professional service sales proposals. The current
business process is informal. Employees of the Sales department request information from
professeional services personnel by using e-mail, telephone, and face-to-face meetings. There is
no single point of contact and the system only tends to work well when the salesperson and the
appropriate Professional Services Managers have a personal relationship.
Existing Technology Infrastructure
The company’s IT department makes most of the software purchasing decisions. In some cases,
the company departments also implement applications for their specific needs. The following
applications are deployed:
CRMApp – A customer relationship management (CRM) system used by sales to track
opportunities and opportunity requirements. ERP App – A very strategic enterprise resource
planning (ERP) system used to process sales orders and pay vendors, including professional
service contractors. The application includes a module for analyst resource planning that is not
deployed. The implementation of such a module is a long, expensive project and benefits are
unlikely for many years. XLine – A system that enables the Professional Services department to
obtain contractors from approved vendors without submitting a formal request for proposal (RFP).
CPoint – A system to track professional service resources (analysts). The company’s IT
department does not support this software. Microsoft Office – The Phone Company also has
access to Office 2007 through an Enterprise Agreement (EA). Office 2003 is deployed on all
client computers. The Phone Company has Microsoft Software Assurance (SA) for all of its
Microsoft-licensed products, which include Office, Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office
Project Server, Microsoft Office Project Porfolio Server, and Microsoft SQL Server. All client
software is deploye by using an automated deployment system. Server software is deployed
manually.
BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS
Planned Changes.
Sales management and the IT department believe that the proper combination of SharePoint
technologies and electronic forms, templates, and workflow would help improve business process
efficiency.
Problem Statements
The Phone Company identifies the following problems concerning the current business process
for CV management:
Use of outdated CVs by Sales Representatives leads to incorrect resource identication and
assignment.
Sales Representatives cannot identify whether CVs are up-to-date.
CVs are maintained in different formats.
CVs are not indexed or centrally stored.
Communication between the company departments is inefficient.
ERP App and CRMApp fail to provide any management capabilities for the CVs.
Business Goals
The Sales department has identified the following desirable standards for a proposed future state:
Standardized CVs
Standardized process and workflow Fast, efficient request for CVs
Accurate and up-to-date information
Resource availability and scheduling
Integration with the enterprise applications
Integraton with contract and statement of work development.
Integration with third-party vendor resource acquisition, which is currently undertaken separately.
INTERVIEWEES
Sales Manager
Sales Managers are more concerned about the amount of time their Sales Representatives
spend calling other employees to organize sales proposals, than the amount of time they spend
on calls to customers. They believe that an automated solution would cut the duration of the sales
proposal process by 75 percent. For each proposal, a representative typically spends between
one to two weeks gathering CVs from the Professional Services department. This includes eight
to 10 hours communicating within the company and two to three hours of preparing a CV
package for a customer.
IT Planners
The IT Planners are concerned about strategic alignment and the need to maximize use of
software already purchased to minimize development costs.
Professional Services Manager.
The Professional Services Manager tracks all professional services and manages all analysts,
including scheduling anaysts for new work. The Professional Services Manager favors the current
process, which facilitates organizational control. The Professional Services Manager has the
following goals:
Ensure that the Sales department only submits CVs that have been approved by the Professional
Services department. Increase use of analysts by the Professional Services department.
Analysts
Analysts perform consulting work for The Phone Company customers and have limited insight
into the sales proposal process, generally communicating only with their Professional Services
Manager. Analysts report that the Human Resources department sometimes fails to define job
titles used in CVs according to industry-standard terms.
Sales Representative
Sales Representatives support the current informal CV process and have the necessary contact
information for key professional service individuals. The representatives agree that the current
process has a high learning curve and must be standardized to account for vacations and
employee attrition.
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You need to limit the scope of the sales proposal generation process to ensure that it is
completed by the end of a three-day business value planning services (BVPS) workshop. What
should you do?
A.
Include the entire CV process and an application integration plan.
B.
Limit the scope to the CV process, workflow, and accuracy. Only include high-level cost and
financial benefit details.
C.
Limit the scope to the CV process, workflow, and accuracy. Include a detailed business case
and an implementation plan.
D.
Capture the entire professional services resource planning process. Only include high-level
cost and financial benefit details.