IBM - Sales Enablement Program of the Year

Company: IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Enablement Program of the Year

Nomination Title: Driving Business Intelligence Strategies through Data Analysis

Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, explaining the nominated achievement since July 1, 2018, OR a written essay of up to 650 words describing the same? (Choose one): An essay/case study of up to 650 words

I – Background:

The Accelerate and Agile methodologies that have been implemented in the EMEA Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) organization since May 2017 are based on key metrics that help define and measure the level of service provided to the sales teams and our clients. The universe covers 16 Business Units and 10 Markets across Europe and MEA (Middle East & Africa).

II – Deliverables:

After running a core model for two years - providing insights, identifying opportunities for improvement across the whole organization in an Agile way, and training all the squads to establish the baseline in order to be able to measure the operations and provide coverage for all markets and business units - the Data Analyst Team wanted to take a step forward in enabling our squads to take full ownership of their metrics, in using and reading them for continuous improvement. The Data Analysts have been providing dedicated support. As a result, they had a clear idea of what the main challenges and difficulties would be for the squads while handling service requests.

A toolkit was designed to help all members of the organization get the correct insights from the metrics. In addition, the Data Analyst Team worked on several automations to assist leaders in offloading the manual tasks related to preparing data showcases.

The backbones of this massive program are:

-The Metrics School – an online one-stop shop where all of the knowledge of the Data Analysts is -collected.
The Metrics Dashboard and the Metrics Benchmark - where best practices are identified for continuous improvement, as well as where we gain customized insights.
-The Scorecard – a complete dashboard with the golden Metrics, helpful to monitor the health of the markets and their squads. Shared weekly with the squads.
-The Cycle Time and Throughput Prediction (Iteration#1) – monitors the forecast based on historical data and its best/worst scenarios Helps us act preventively.
-The Order Management Dashboard – a Cognitive Dashboard that allows order management to visualize their metrics and enables leaders to take timely and relevant tactical and strategic decisions.
-CATs Package – a monthly package that the Data Analysts provide to all market leaders with an overview of employee sentiment, with root causes and comment insights.
-The Showcase Automation – an RPA that creates on-demand decks, eliminating the need to manually prepare the showcase materials for all leaders.

III – EMEA Q2C Operational Results:

Operational results have shown a continuous improvement trend, delivering the highest value to the business/sales organization and to our clients.

Please, refer to the year to year improvement regarding our Golden Accelerate Metrics (see attachment):
-Cycle Time has improved 11.5%
-NPS has improved 9%
-Employee Sentiment has improved 2.6%

Additionally, this new business intelligence contributed to significant cost efficiencies, essentially allowing leadership to better define their priorities, align their teams on those, reduce waste in operational execution, and optimize the level of resources based on data and prediction.

For the Order Management world, the metrics visualization that the Data Analyst team provided helped to reduce the pending Orders 35% from 3,700 in April to 2,400 in July.

The results of this program deliver the most valued data, equipping our sales and operations team with meaningful insight into metrics trends. They now have a base for the right business decisions at the right time and with the right focus. Today we are using predictive data, real predictive data, not simulations, to provide our stakeholders and clients with prescriptive analysis and insights.