Success Stories

Process Improvement (Complex Sales)

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Business Need

This Division of a multinational manufacturer of food and beverage packaging needed to document and standardize their proposal response processes for new and existing customers.  The sales processes were complex, often requiring the involvement of multiple groups at the company, including finance and accounting, product operations, product management, sales and executive leadership.  The proposals were typically for multi-year, multi-million dollar deals in a very competitive environment.  In addition, the company had recently established a new product manager team and the current processes were not documented, so it was difficult for the product managers to get up to speed.  They had over 4000 SKU’s (stock keeping units), and data was in disparate systems that was hard to get to and use.  Adding to the complexity, many of their sales team members were remote and proposals often had to be turned around in a short period of time, which resulted in errors and inefficiencies.


Services Provided

The scope of this engagement included activities related to assisting the company in developing process documentation for the product management sales support processes.  Key tasks included:

  • Finalizing tools and process documentation methodology to be used for the engagement
  • Planning, meeting, and communicating to key company personnel regarding their participation in executing the project plan
  • Documenting, in detail, all major aspects of the current sales processes being used by the product managers on the Division’s team
  • Reviewing all current tools being used by the sales and product management
  • Determining potential improvements in the sales and product management processes and working with the current team to document these improvements
  • Training the product management team on using a standardized process
  • Testing the processes with actual scenarios and modifying as required
  • Developing a deliverable package that was turned over to the sales and product management team for future changes

Value Provided

Core Catalysts used our process improvement methodology to analyze and document the product management sales support processes for the company.  We collaborated with the company to identify existing processes and their components, and mapped them into easily understood swim lanes.  By visually representing each step, we were able to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies.  The documentation produced by this project is now referenced as training material for the new product management function at the company.  The cycle time between receipt of RFPs and bid response was significantly improved and the quality of the responses was improved due to increased access to appropriate financial information.

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