Main Digital Offers Business Process Recommendations for Client Success

Business hand writing concept of efficiency business process

Case Study at a Glance

  • Client: Bioscience Sustainability & Ecological Restoration
  • Industry: Environmental Design
  • Size: Small (1–49 employees)
  • Main Digital Services: Main (Discover)
  • Platform: Salesforce for Internal Data
  • Summary: A national bioscience company engaged Main Digital to evaluate the current state of their core business processes for inconsistencies, underutilization of existing technology, and key process areas affected by ineffective communication and information sharing. Main Digital provided the client team with a set of recommendations to implement to deliver immediate and long-term benefits by conducting leadership and subject matter expert interviews, utilizing additional sources of insight such as internal data and external research to bolster and complement stakeholder interviews. The improvement recommendations encompassed opportunities for technology enhancement, process improvement, and automation.

Overview

A national bioscience company engaged Main Digital to evaluate the current state of its core business processes for inconsistencies, the underutilization of existing technology, and key process areas affected by ineffective communication and information sharing using the Main()Method™. The client’s business was in a hyper-growth stage, resources were constrained, and demand increased rapidly. The client needed a solution and a set of recommendations before year-end and Main Digital made that happen.

Opportunity 

Poor communication between business units and team members led to a high level of manual, mundane, and duplicative work efforts. The need for more technical communication between the various systems and applications used by the client pointed to the need to modernize the existing technical stack.

Main Digital Solution  

The Approach 

Main Digital set out to hear the voice of the customer, which included senior-level leadership and subject matter experts (SMEs). The goal was to understand, not only their roles and responsibilities, but also the key processes they performed, and more importantly pain points they recognized within the work they performed daily—primarily focused on people, process and technology. Our approach to the engagement was to use the Main()Method™ to evaluate the current state and core processes for inconsistencies, the underutilization of technology, and key process areas affected by ineffective communication and information sharing. We aligned with the client that recommendations would focus on opportunities for technology enhancement, process improvement and automation to remedy their pain points based on the problem statement developed during discovery.

The Process 

Before the engagement, Main Digital conducted a two-hour discovery session with the client and key stakeholders to produce a problem statement, understand the current state of high-level pain points within the organization—people, process and technology-focused—and gain an understanding of what the client’s future state should look like. Main Digital utilized the A3 framework to take a structured approach to problem-solving and continuous improvement with the client. This provided the Main Digital team a baseline to understand the current situation before initiating an engagement to determine the nature of the issues, the range of possible countermeasures, the best countermeasures and the means to put them into practice. Main Digital interviewed 13 stakeholders, ranging from senior-level leadership to process SMEs, to gather inputs relative to communication and the flow of information between and within teams. The team utilized internal systems and data provided by the client and external research to bolster and complement stakeholder interviews where possible. Main Digital proceeded to consolidate the outputs from stakeholder interviews and the various internal and external sources of insight to create key themes that include weaknesses and opportunities for improvement within the organization. Key themes included:

  • Lack of Operational Transparency
  • Unclear Roles and Responsibilities
  • Lack of Documented Processes and Standardization
  • Ineffective Communication with Systems and Tools

The Outcome

Main Digital conducted a current state assessment of the client’s core business processes to synthesize recommendations to alleviate a breakdown in communication and the flow of information between team members and systems. This was a key milestone, complemented by end-to-end process flow diagrams, that was presented to the client as a current state assessment of their various core processes including, but not limited to, sales, manufacturing and inventory management. The engagement resulted in the Main Digital team providing client leadership with a set of recommendations that when implemented, deliver immediate and long-term benefits, including opportunities for technology enhancement, process improvement and automation. Those recommendations included:

  • Four opportunities to enhance existing systems or tools or to introduce new products or capabilities to bridge the flow of information.
  • Five opportunities to improve upon existing business processes for optimization or to meet new quality standards.
  • Five robotic process automation (RPA) opportunities to alleviate manual efforts involved in the client’s core processes.