Creating Real-Time Analysis For an International Business

Lookinglass designed an information management system that dramatically improved opportunity conversion and profitability.                                                                              

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Issue                                                 

An international company was struggling to consistently manage its talent and clients across all of its offices. Resource allocation and pricing decisions were being made locally and reactively. 

The company’s management was concerned the business was missing opportunities and that their pricing practices were ignoring potentially valuable revenue streams.

Lookinglass was hired to design an information management system that would aggregate the company’s sales, bidding and job status information in real-time across all of its offices, and would allow the company’s management to immediately analyze the impact of local decision making.

Challenge

The Lookinglass team was engaged to design a system that would support the local needs of each office, satisfy the requirements of the company’s finance and accounting teams, and encourage ongoing customization. 

The system would strictly control the amount of information available to each user group, allow for customized reporting and be accessible over the internet.

Finally, it required an intuitive user interface that eliminated the need for extensive training or user manuals.

Approach

Lookinglass mapped the company’s workflow into seven specific areas, and developed an architectural map of the flow of information through the company, including variances for each of the local offices.

We then broke the company into six primary user types and interviewed key members to define the specific access needs of each group. 

Finally, we conducted an RFP with a list of developers who satisfied the criteria we had established in collaboration with the client’s management team, and conducted a series of demos with each system.

Current Situation

A developer was hired, and Lookinglass supported the development and deployment of the system through beta. After the first year, the system had created the following results:

• Increased conversion of Lead-to-Job Award ratio by thirty percent over the first year
• Increased profitability margin across all jobs by 7 percent
• Reduced average accounts payable by 15 days
• Better strategic use of discounts reduced total discounts to clients by 15 percent
• Reduced bad debts by 70 percent
• Increased percentage of return business from most valuable clients based on profitability analysis
• Expanded opportunities for company’s younger talent with higher profile projects

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