Business Process Automation Solution

Challenge

Large companies are involved in bidding on deals worth millions of dollars and the teams required to pull a response together are typically very large. These teams must juggle a fast, effective response with maintaining regulatory and corporate compliance. To meet SOX control requirements our customer asked us to design and implement a solution that would efficiently manage a manual process of soliciting opinions on bids for up to several dozen stakeholders.

Each response team manually manages who to solicit responses from, which of those people had responded, and what the response was for audit purposes. Sales team members struggled to track all of their spreadsheets and outstanding opinion status. A large amount of time was spent preparing, requesting, and tracking opinions that could have otherwise been spent preparing a better response. From an audit perspective, not having a system to mange this process created additional risk and work to prepare audit reports.

Solution

imason was engaged to design and deploy a SharePoint Portal and InfoPath forms solution to automate the complex process of determining who should be involved based on many RFP related factors. The InfoPath component included all of the business rules to drive who should be involved, and SharePoint workflow tracked which opinions had been solicited and their status. All stakeholders received a personalized view of the requests in their queue, and the system automatically generated reminder email messages to help move the process along.

Result

This solution increases sales team productivity and lower corporate risk by ensuring the appropriate parties are involved to sign off on each RFP or contract. This freed up time for the response team to focus on collaborating towards a winning response. Corporate risk and compliance was managed by automating the required controls for corporate SOX compliance.