A Deal with Winter Blues

by eClerx Services
1 1091 5.0/5

On a cold and windy winter night while Kapil looked out of his office window, he realized that the weather inside was no different. Endless work had made everyone unresponsive and frosty. The situation would only worsen with the upcoming high volume season.“Our work is not specific and does not follow any kind of set procedure. Only the experienced people in the process are able to complete work on time” said one of the newly hired resource. The work was monotonous in nature, and consumed significant amount of time.

This winter was nothing new. Many other team leads had tried in the past to deal with this problem and had failed miserably. To lead his team out of this dark night, Kapil decided to involve the Quality team that had helped them in fighting these winters, in the past.

With help of his project mentor Pratikesh, Kapil developed a quick action plan that included the use of internal framework for process improvement, 'WiSE', for waste identification and solution development. Looking at the increase in restlessness of the team members working in the process, Kapil decided to include the technology team to speed up the solution phase.

The process was scoped for robotic process automation. This solution was equivalent to setting up a fireplace in this cold winter night. The solution was proposed to the client, but Kapil had not anticipated what was coming next.

The client refused the solution due to high cost of implementation.

Not ready to give up, Kapil and Pratikesh conducted multiple discussions with the team, which resulted in generation of possibilities like standardizing deal names, development of a deal name repository, tool enhancement, etcetera.

Solutions were proposed to the client one-by-one. Only to be rejected one after the other.

Sitting by the office window, Kapil felt that he had not done anything to fight the chill. Once again, he called the project mentor to discuss if anything that could be done to help his team. This time Pratikesh proposed to combine multiple solutions that were identified previously. They sat together and decided to build an internal repository of deal patterns which were then coded in an autonomated (automation with human intervention) solution. This tool had the capability of extracting the deal name based on deal patterns.

This gave birth to the 'Auto Deal Identifier' tool. This solution was able to draw customer buy-in. Further, the team was able to reduce manual efforts in the process by 92%. The solution drew more synergy amongst the teams and generated the heat that was required in such chilly nights.

Tales of their deed were communicated so that it would become a source of inspiration to sustain their legacy.

Lessons Learned

  1. Phase wise approach to the problem focused on customer first policy helped to reach the final solution through all the struggles and unsuccessful attempts
  2. Team’s efforts sparked new light in the process - from being a bottleneck, the process became a leading example of change in the organization
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24 October 2017 by Arindam Acharyya
It is one thing to reach the top, it is another to remain at the top