The global logistics and supply chain client was losing business because they were not able to provide competitive quotes, optimally utilize freight capacity or exchange booking information across sales, operations and channel partners.

Containers and eventually ships were being loaded with little or no pricing intelligence.

The task was to create a single customer facing platform that would integrate all back-end systems with front office operations to help deal with business demand in real time and make freight pricing transparent and profitable.

The sub-tasks were to identify best-fit CRM platform, prepare an integration plan to connect various applications with Salesforce.com that were required to present an intelligent quote, identify data to be migrated and transform the way Sales teams operated.

A series of workshops were conducted to establish the baseline and target operating model(s). This also helped understand the change management required to deliver a Salesforce.com engagement of this size (to over 100+ countries)

The right team size and resources were identified to carry out Business Analysis, Integration, Data migration, Design & Development, Testing and Deployment planned over a period of 12 months.

The project governance was put in place and I managed the various teams (internal, client and 3rd parties) to track and monitor the deliverables along the timelines, engage stakeholders to address risks and resolve issues, kept the business engaged informed and the communication channels open for Sales teams to provide their continuous feedback throughout the iterative and agile delivery.

The first set of end-to-end capability was released on time and within budget allowing Sales teams to quote based on direction load factors, availability of cargo space, time and criticality of shipments and pricing based on customer related contractual agreements.

The final set of automated processes were rolled out in waves to various regions and support was streamlined to demonstrate the newly gained efficiencies reducing the time to quote from days to minutes and increasing the profitability by 50% on some routes.