How Yokohama Tire Canada Improved Profitability Through Solutions Facilitating Increased Collaboration

Yokohama Tire Canada is a major distributing company that sells and distributes 2,000 different tire products in Canada through 3,800 dealers.

Challenges

Despite the success of its business model in terms of size and growth, Yokohama was facing challenges in improving its operational efficiency in certain areas:

•         Manual processes when quoting prices in dealer agreements
•         Slow information flow and decision-making
•         Many different and non-consolidated information systems
•         Relevant information trapped in siloes and not shared
•         Existing IT systems not leverage to their full potential

These challenges eventually led Yokohama to hire Spot Solutions in an attempt to improve their quote development and approval process. This was done through Microsoft SharePoint 2010, which was already in place, but not exploited.

Solution

Spot Solutions developed SharePoint integration consisting of a sophisticated workflow with a highly integrated quote form. Editing and adjustments to the quote process was now real-time and interactive thereby allowing multiple users to assess and change quote information continuously. The previous (inefficient) manual flow of information was thereby irrevocably buried.

Results

The results of this improved system setup were substantial and led to significant improvements in connection, communication and information exchange across credit, sales, service staff and executive management.

Yokohama thus managed to bring its quote process down from around 7 days to 48 hours – and the following year further down to 18.5 hours. In addition, Yokohama quoted increased visibility, optimization and automation as well as better customer service as key benefits achieved. Yokohama was able to handle a 25% increase in number of quotes without hiring any additional staff. Impressive!

This post is based on a Microsoft Case Study. Read the full article on Yokohama Tire here or visit Yokohama Tire Canada here: www.yokohama.ca.

How the ‘Big Four’ Consulting Firms are Using Collaboration

The Big Four use online collaboration tools both internally and externally to the organisation. While external usage aims to foster closer and more efficient working relationships with clients, internally the use of these tools is a way to nurture improved knowledge management practices, collaborative decision-making and employee retention.

The client-consultant relationship: what is the problem?

A typical practical challenge facing Big Four consulting teams is how to assimilate and analyse large volumes of data in a short amount of time, and from there generate the value-adding insights that the client is paying for. Even if the consultant’s initial data request is well conceived, the absence of a dedicated collaboration platform can leave both consultants and clients reliant on a host of manual formats to transfer information (i.e. memory stick, CD, or hard copy printouts). 

Similarly, despite their growing personal usage, public cloud-based document-sharing solutions such as DropBox are generally not considered appropriate for use in professional circles. Particularly during an intense engagement, the potential for data loss is high across all of these formats. In some cases, the efforts and risks involved in information sharing due to the absence of a collaboration platform can lead to a less productive client-consultant relationship, and sub-optimal project outcomes.

How collaboration helps

Problems of efficiency and security can be overcome through the use of an online collaboration platform, such as those supported by Windows and IBM. User access is controlled by a nominated project administrator, who can grant different levels of permission across engagement teams. Information siloes are overcome because both the client and consultant teams have access to the same single platform, and have complete visibility of the information that has been provided. Consultants are more able to work across multiple locations because they have real-time, secure access to the required information.

More advanced collaborative platforms in use across the Big Four move beyond a pure information management function and, through live discussion forums for example, can be used to enable real-time feedback-sharing between the consultant and client. This can be especially valuable when working in large, possibly geographically dispersed teams, where opportunities for face-to-face contact time are more limited and there is a pressing need to offset the impact that busy schedules and travel time can have on productivity. In addition, consulting firms are increasingly using collaboration as a means to support their traditional networking efforts. For example, a consulting firm might establishing an online discussion forums to stimulate interest in a recent thought leadership article published by the firm, in advance of a physical client networking event.

Additional internal value

In addition to their client-facing role, collaborative platforms are used within the Big Four consulting firms to improve knowledge management, transition to a more collaborative decision-making style and improve employee retention. On the knowledge management front, a single platform can assist with the secure and organised storage of project information, once an engagement has been concluded. Considering the traditional predominance of informal, point-to-point knowledge sharing between individual consultants, this can be important, both in term of providing continuity between projects, and transferring knowledge and sharing lessons learned between different consulting teams and divisions. This benefits the organisation by building the internal capability it needs to succeed in the market, and deliver successful consulting projects in the future.

Collaborative platforms have also impacted the way Big Four consulting firms manage themselves. Senior leadership is making increasing use of online forums within the firm’s intranet to pre-position and gain employee feedback on organisational decisions (e.g. changes to organisational structure, roles and policies). The increased transparency and involvement that collaboration is enabling may also help the Big Four consulting firms with employee retention. Considering that the ability of the Big Four to deliver value to their clients is closely linked to the quality of its people, and hence the ability to retain them, this last benefit of collaboration should not be underestimated.

Garage Gamers

A bunch of entrepreneurs working in a garage to start a firm of their dreams. Sounds familiar??? Well in this blog, we are going to introduce you to one similar yet exciting story – Duxter. Duxter is a social network for gamers. It is a small company (8 employees) with a network of contractors on the west coast of the USA and in the UK. It has recently started working with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration platform – Teambox. In this blog we will explore why Duxter chose Teambox and how SMEs can reap the benefits of SaaS-based collaboration for consolidating project management and collaboration.

Why collaboration???

Duxter started as a group of four entrepreneurs in a garage. Initially it was a little bit easier with everybody in charge of their own staff. But as the team grown, things started to get complex as lot of work was outsourced to freelancers, so some team members were working remotely as well as most of them were working on very small part of the project not knowing the complete details of the project. Adding the extra layer of process, in terms of Teambox collaboration framework, has been helpful to keep track of all the details for these entrepreneurs. That level of process has made them more efficient as a team because there's less time spent communicating. For companies of Duxter's size, having one tool that everybody can be on is very valuable. It's a better workflow, and better synergy, for the entire company now that everybody is on one system.

Why Teambox???

Teambox was easy to use and easy to understand. Other tools they looked at might have been more powerful and robust, but there would be a huge learning curve, or the product was non-intuitive and not easy to use. Main focus of Teambox is on following areas:

Creating and managing tasks:

It is based on tasks – which was the modus operandi of Duxter on day to day basis dealing with lot of partners and third parties. There were no fundamental changes in Duxter's business when they moved to Teambox, there were process changes. Now when someone reports a bug on the site, a task is created in Teambox, which is assigned to a PM. The task ends up getting resolved and communicated to the user.

Task reporting

It is very simple to track the progress of the task and view the status of various milestones with the help of calendars, workload views and Gantt charts.

File and content management

Today’s start-ups extensively use free cloud solutions (like Google Docs and Dropbox) and many of Duxter's corporate documents were already in the cloud, which made migration to Teambox rather simpler. Teambox integrates with both, so it didn't require them to on board documents. In fact, the biggest things they had to migrate over were tasks and projects from previous project management tools. To resolve this, Duxter team used Teambox API for migration. After that they just built a bridge from Duxter’s site and Teambox using the Teambox API. Then they were able to transfer all the bugs from their custom system to the Teambox system and all in a single day’s work only.

Team communication & Mobility

The most simple aspect of Teambox is that one can convert discussion items into tasks directly. Also all its tools are available on mobile as well providing instant access almost anywhere.

To sum up, simple collaborative tools are now transforming the way SMEs approach their work. Also these tools are not very capital intensive which also makes them attractive to deploy in early phase of the company’s life. We will see more and more adoption of such simple and innovative tools in our upcoming blog posts!!!



References

Kelly, W. 2013. Case study: Duxter uses Teambox to streamline collaboration and project management | ZDNet. [online] Available at: http://www.zdnet.com/case-study-duxter-uses-teambox-to-streamline-collaboration-and-project-management-7000017408/ [Accessed: 21 Aug 2013].