The Challenge
A leading global real estate investment and management company seeking to develop a comprehensive approach towards knowledge management (KM) contacted Evalueserve. The organization was witnessing increased demand for business pitches from current and prospective clients. Even in the face of this positive business health indicator, the absence of a strong KM infrastructure had become its major pain point that needed a remedy. Evalueserve recognized the need to address various aspects of KM in the client organization, both at the individual and holistic levels. We approached the project with the objective of reducing pitch time by 40% by leveraging knowledge assets residing with the client and Evalueserve’s automation capabilities.
Benefits Achieved
- Saved more than 5,000 hours annually by streamlining the process of creating, storing, and accessing key data and boilerplate information
- Achieved enhanced consistency across data and business pitch related artifacts, which were strategically placed at a central repository that works for all teams and geographies
- Defined a process for updating data at a fixed frequency and with appropriate tagging
- Facilitated ~35% reduction in average time to market
- Achieved 30-40% reduction in request for proposal (RFP) response time
Our Approach
To reach the goal of reducing pitch time by 40%, Evalueserve began by conducting workshops in major client offices across three continents. More than 100 firm members, including business line operations executives, as well as representatives from the finance, human resources, research, knowledge management, and business development departments participated in the workshops, which involved one-to-one meetings and telephonic interviews.
Our Solution
Evalueserve recommended a three-stage KM approach to the client:
- Stage 1: The Evalueserve team sought out past business pitches from both stakeholders – those who seek data and those who provide it. The project team also asked process related questions. We formulated a robust global knowledge management strategy for the organization, based on the inputs received.
- Stage 2: Evalueserve looked at the ‘four Ps – people, process, product, and platforms’ associated with the clients KM function. We readjusted the existing structure by reassigning roles and responsibilities across locations. The team also suggested KM best practices, and provided a list of KM artifacts that each stakeholder needs to maintain.
- Stage 3: We designed a comprehensive roadmap of recommended changes, split into strategic and tactical action plans, that the organization would need to implement in a three-phase approach. Some of the initiatives were:
o Creation of a central repository that would hold business pitches and organizational data from all teams
o Standardization of pitch and data format, and appropriate tagging, to ensure that anyone with access to the repository can find information easily
o Regular, frequency-based addition of new data and deletion of irrelevant statistics, so that the latest figures are available to information seekers
This Evalueserve-led global initiative yielded firm dividends for the client, and fully modernized its pitch related KM infrastructure.
Business Impact
The client achieved time efficiency of 5000 hours annually, enhanced consistency across data and business pitch related artifacts, and 30–40% reduction in request for proposal (RFP) response time.
It achieved enhanced global collaboration between decision makers, KM professionals, and the sales community.
