IMPORTANT NOTICE!
Client
End Users
Project Overview
Due to rapidly increasing competition in the market, our client, Bigfood Group, realized an urgent need to optimize internal business processes and improve overall efficiency across the whole organization. One of the pillar stones in achieving this goal was to take the company through a course of massive digital transformation.
To support the ongoing development of a wide range of products, our client required a strictly formalized approach to reduce operational costs in manufacturing new products and discontinuing the production of existing products.
Regularly, every product goes through a lengthy and complex internal workflow while being reviewed by multiple departments before finally reaching one of the production plants. Each department has a specific role to play within a new product creation process and has to work on specific steps in a particular order. The progress of the process was tracked through dozens of emails and spreadsheets, which caused the cumbersome problem of a delay in creating a new product and inefficiency in controlling the processes.
On another end, when a decision to discount one of the products is made, it requires several departments’ involvement to stop production, packaging, warehousing, marketing, and so on, almost simultaneously.
So, the client’s primary objective was to reorganize their processes to be more streamlined and automated so that the business’s most vital activities would be less prone to human error.
Challenge
When our team took over the project, it became evident that the core challenge to address was to build the process itself before it was even possible to start automating. This was due to the fact that the existing workflows weren’t documented enough, so it was hard to understand from the beginning.
While conducting a set of interview sessions, our team identified some significant issues in the distribution of responsibilities between multiple departments, which could have led to unnecessary bottlenecks along the way. For example, in some cases, a department could have been responsible for activities that had little connection to their area of responsibility, whilst in other cases, it was possible for multiple departments to execute some tasks in parallel.
Solution
01
Business Processes Model
Uncovered hidden issues within the distribution of responsibilities and the order of performing operational tasks
02
Solution design
Design an automated solution featuring an already optimized business logic.
03
Web application
Automation of some most vital workflows of our client.
04
Transition roadmap
Internal training, and release of every application in an iterative way using the phase-gate technique.
One of the first deliverables in this project came thanks to a thorough analysis of the existing business processes and in-depth interviews with respective department leads. Gaining a deeper understanding of the business context helped us to uncover hidden issues within the distribution of responsibilities and the order of performing operational tasks, which, subsequently, allowed us to design an automated solution featuring an already optimized business logic.
In the following course, our team came up with a web-based application that has automated some most vital workflows of our client and enabled the possibility for automated email notifications, progress tracking, reporting, and other activities for effective decision-making.
Our team has also planned for the least painful transition roadmap to updated workflows, including internal training sessions, and released every application in an iterative way using the phase-gate technique. Each next application was staged for further release upon successful adoption of the predecessor.
Result
The delivered solution helped our client reshape long and complex manual processes into straightforward and transparent automated workflows. So, all company departments can now stay focused and synchronized while working on a new product or discontinuing existing product production. Customizable email notifications and reminders helped significantly reduce time delays between multiple dependent activities. Integration with the internally used ERP system guaranteed data consistency across all organizational units.
