Challenge:
Our client, a well known luxury retailer, was running a number of digital initiatives. An over reliance on human resource to conduct the low-value, repetitive, standardised business processes related to these digital transformation initiatives was proving to be expensive, inefficient and was causing a high number of errors. The retailer needed to engage with a consultancy to address these inefficiencies, reduce cost and improve the overall operational running of their portfolio of projects.
Solution:
P2 was engaged to establish an automation and tooling centre of excellence within the portfolio management office, which was also being led by P2. With its deep experience of automation in digital transformation, the P2 team worked closely with the business to map out existing paper-based and manual processes and identified change requests, business idea and dependency management processes as being suitable for automation.
The P2 team then designed and implemented solutions using a web-based, collaborative platform. These solutions, underpinned by several workflows, automated a number of functions, including the gathering of approvals and the ability for approvers to share information to support their decisions. P2 also delivered training for the new processes to all approvers and to the wider project management community.
P2 was also tasked with building a suite of interactive apps and dashboards to provide insight to facilitate better decision making. The P2 team designed several apps to assist delivery teams with managing the progress of their projects, including a ‘risk and issue’ app and a suite of interactive reports and dashboards to simplify project reporting and transform data into actionable insights.
Benefits:
- Establishing an automation centre of excellence to support automation of low-value repetitive business operations
- Delivery of interactive apps and dynamic dashboards to help surface information and aid decision making
- Establishing evidence of improving efficiency in automated processes, such as improved turnaround time for change request approvals, increased visibility and accountability for key change decisions
- Preparing to avoid interruptions to the change management process during the COVID-19 pandemic and accommodating people working from home
- Reduced costs and an increase in the value of the portfolio office to the business
