Customer Experience and Cost Structure Improvement

The Challenge:

A $5B electrical and utility infrastructures component manufacturer sought to integrate multiple acquisitions housed within a multi-national holding company structure into a single operating company. The goal was to improve customer experience, which in turn would reduce cost to serve, increase market share, accelerate integration of future acquisitions through harmonized commercial, sales operations and customer service functions. The client had failed for more than 18 months to make progress on the transformation and fired multiple leads. 

Approach:

Month 1: Got control of past failures and reorganized the effort into a logical program
- Documented key process steps and mapped 200+ disparate operational challenges across each of the process steps
- Coalesced those process steps into 14 separate projects with clear owners with accountability and responsibility for delivery
- Added 120+ team members across eight corporate functions to teams 
- Developed detailed charter and guard rails, deliverables, milestone plans, and detailed multi-year project plans 

Month 2: Stood up transformation management office
- Developed detailed transformation program plan integrating the individual project plans; with resource loads and cross-program dependencies modeled to mitigate risk 
- Established governance structure and cadence: project status meetings, recurring steering committee and ExCom report-outs; escalation process
- Built communications and change management plans
- Coordinated with IT to manage transformation activities requiring changes to core systems (SAP, Sales Force, etc.)
- Built model to track benefits versus plan
Months 3+: Drove execution of individual projects
- Ran weekly project PMO calls with 2-week rolling action tracker to hold teams accountable and to drive day to day outcomes
- Drove daily project team calls and developed tools for teams to deliver scopes
- Facilitated in-person and remote working sessions for collaborative problem solving and to accelerate alignment on future state decisions

Result:

- Program began delivering material changes to customer experience and cost structure within first three months and rolled out quarterly tranches of changes