Simplifying And Standardizing Multi-State Sales And Marketing Processes

The Client's Challenge

To rationalize their number of systems, Australia Post had completed a comprehensive exercise to map, at a high level, their processes and systems across a very State-based structured Commercial Division.

The next step was to rationalize, standardize and improve the processes so as to be able to eliminate duplications and unnecessary processes and rationalize the supporting systems. The Sales processes were selected as these were the most important for the Commercial Division.

The head of Australia Post’s process re-engineering area abandoned his own existing methodology (which he had used in Australia Post for 10 years) and selected Business Simplification as his preferred approach.

Scope

All areas of Australia Post Sales including

• Sales planning
• Customer management
• Retail sales management
• Tender response and contract management

This represented four concurrent process streams.

Approach

Australia Post appointed a core team of 9 to be trained in Business Simplification techniques with a further 42 staff involved in the workshops from across the country.

All areas of Australia Post were involved — including Couriers, Warehousing and Logistics

TOP assigned 2.5 consultants to lead the assignment

The four process streams were simplified concurrently over 14 weeks

All State Managers and Sales Managers were interviewed and updated regularly

Four of the States were represented on the core project team to ensure national coverage and input.

The Results

• Forty-five processes were eliminated completely

• The number of process steps overall was reduced by over 40%

• New marketing processes were identified as required and then designed

• Process objectives were redefined resulting in new KPIs and performance measures

• All sales processes were standardized across the national State structure, while allowing for the differences between the smaller and bigger States

• Nine Australia Post staff were trained, mentored and experienced in Business Simplification techniques.

The Payoff

The resultant end-to-end processes linked all of the processes — planning, budgeting, customer management, tendering and sales — (which had previously been disconnected) and mapped their interdependencies and information flows for the first time

The respective roles of Product Management and Sales were clarified (a persistent problem)

The assignment identified the need and defined the specific roles for a new Marketing function to support Sales and Product Management

A subsequent Australia Post project to identify all of the issues and problems associated with bid and contract management found that this Simplification assignment had not only captured them all, but had resolved them too.