4-page Case Study - Posted 3/21/2007
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Canadian Professional Services Firm Accelerates the Generation of Proposals
CGI Insurance Business Services (CGI IBS) focuses on delivering world-class services to the Insurance industry across North America. CGI IBS was looking to streamline an already-successful proposal generation process. By implementing components of the 2007 Microsoft® Office system, CGI IBS aims to facilitate and accelerate its proposal development process, which is based on a worldwide delivery model involving cross-functional and geographically diverse teams and, sometimes, external partners. To improve proposal management and collaboration for multiple individuals from across the globe, CGI IBS implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. The company expects to reduce costs and improve efficiency in its proposal generation cycle.
Situation
Founded in 1976, CGI is a world-class leader in information technology (IT) and business process services with the expertise and capabilities to serve the needs of businesses and governments of all sizes. CGI and its affiliated companies employ approximately 25,000 professionals and have over 100 offices that serve clients in 19 countries.
CGI is a leading partner to insurers with services that encompass product management and sales channel development, and deliver structured platforms that transform such functions as underwriting, policy administration, premium accounting, and claims. CGI also manages non-core yet critical back-office functions on its clients’ behalf, allowing them to achieve optimal business performance.
CGI Insurance Business Services (IBS) was created to focus primarily on selling and supplying the products and services required by the insurance industry in North America. These products and services range from small informational reports (such as claims and policy tracking, credit, inspections, rating, valuations, and scoring) used by companies to help underwrite policies and adjust claims, to full IT and facility management and enterprise policy and claims management.
Business Priorities
To increase gross revenue and customer satisfaction, CGI IBS has identified specific business priorities that include:
- Meeting or beating financial targets for the company.
- Growing the business organically.
- Maintaining client loyalty by providing superior value and performance.
- Being seen as a leader in the marketplace.
- Providing an environment in which employees can be successful.
Toward achieving these goals and exceeding the expectations of its clients, it was necessary to optimize the proposal generation process. This would enable CGI IBS to capture new business opportunities even more quickly.
Aiming to Optimize Proposal Generation
The proposal generation process in particular showed an opportunity for optimization. In the creation of a proposal, the process can involve many members in different functional and/or geographical areas. The ideal proposal generation process will utilize knowledge from different subject matter experts, specific account teams, or certain individuals with previous experience or prior relationships with the client.
When CGI IBS decides to pursue a new business opportunity, a team is constructed to maximize the use and reuse of knowledge and the expertise of many people. By using this past experience and knowledge, CGI IBS ensures that the best solution is designed for the client, and the best strategy is implemented to win the proposal.
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Spending less time on proposal development will enable us to build better responses, increase time spent on designing the solution, and, ultimately, increase our win rate. |
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Wayne Beck
Vice President of Delivery for Insurance Solution & Services, CGI Insurance Business Services |
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After the team is established, it will define a strategy to win the deal, identify required experts, draft a proposal, and establish the best price and costs. All of these steps involve teamwork and many meetings, either in person or over the phone. Once the proposal draft documents have been completed, they will go through many review iterations within the team and with the management. This is done in order to ensure that the proposal is accurately presenting the best solution and will ultimately win the contract.
For some types of proposals, collaboration with external partners can be necessary to complete a response to a bid. Wayne Beck, Vice President of Delivery for Insurance Solution & Services at CGI IBS, comments on the difficulties of creating excellent proposals: “We serve a wide diversity of clients and expectations, and anytime you are dealing with a worldwide delivery model that includes multiple, dispersed people from more than one office to deliver a proposal, it will be difficult to coordinate.”
A complex process is a prime candidate for employing tools that can facilitate and simplify collaboration, especially for dispersed teams. Without a central workspace for the creation of proposals, CGI IBS’s process was difficult to coordinate, relying primarily on e-mail messages, conference calls, and face-to-face meetings to communicate and collaborate among team members. The process was labor intensive and time consuming, and a significant amount of travel was usually required in order to join together team members in one location.
In addition, CGI has a corporate framework that must be followed to manage proposals. For instance, a proposal with a certain level of price or budget requires approvals from individuals at specific levels of authority. Adherence to this framework takes time and can be cumbersome without a structured workflow.
See Figure 1 for a detailed breakdown of the process and sub-processes involved in proposal generation.
Critical Success Factors for the Proposal Generation Process
Christian Playford, Vice President of Sales for CGI IBS, and Wayne Beck are responsible for driving revenue growth for the business unit. They identified several critical success factors, and associated key performance indicators (KPIs) for better managing the proposal generation process:
- Increase the cost efficiency of bid response resources (KPI: average cost per proposal response).
- More effective reuse of winning proposal content (KPI: average percentage of content reuse per proposal).
- Reduce the cost of ensuring compliance to the CGI proposal framework (KPI: cost of ensuring compliance).
- Increase the proposal win rate.
The identification of the critical success factors for the proposal generation process helped CGI IBS recognize ways to improve the already-successful process.
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| Figure 1. The proposal generation process |
Solution
In order to increase the efficiency of a proposal response, reuse more proposal content, and ensure compliance with CGI’s framework. CGI IBS deployed Microsoft® Office Professional Plus 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. See Figure 2 for a detailed description of how each step of the proposal generation process (as detailed in the Process Level 2 of Figure 1) has improved, resulting in specific benefits.
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| Figure 2. Breakdown of improvements and benefits for each step of the proposal generation process |
Business Strategies and Tools Used to Enhance Proposal Generation
By working with the newest productivity tools from Microsoft, CGI IBS was able to address the critical success factors and employ new business strategies to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposal generation process, and reduce the cost of ensuring compliance with the corporate proposal process.
Streamlined Proposal Creation, Review, and Approval
The automated workflow and document management in Office SharePoint Server 2007 will help CGI IBS sales teams streamline the process to create, review, and approve proposals in a more structured way, while increasing collaboration. Out-of-the-box workflows enable initiation, participation, tracking, and reporting for common business processes such as document review and approval. Beck emphasizes how the program will streamline proposal generation: “SharePoint Server will drive value, speed, and efficiency in the process.”
Easy Search for Best-in-Class Proposal Content and Expertise
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will enable CGI IBS to easily reuse previous proposal information. Sales personnel can organize and classify content within a centralized document library. Designed for enterprise content management, the central document library can be used as a consistent mechanism to organize, categorize, and navigate through past and current proposal content.
When sales professionals need to search for past proposal content or expertise, they can use the advanced search capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007. With SharePoint Server 2007, CGI IBS professionals can search file shares, Web sites, SharePoint sites, Microsoft Exchange Server Public Folders, and databases. The searches can easily be extended to third-party sources and file types. Sales professionals can also index, search, and extract information from line-of-business applications, relational databases, and other structured content using the Business Data Catalog in Office SharePoint Server 2007. To quickly locate experts, sales professionals can use "people search" capabilities to find people not only by department or job title, but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests.
Adhering to Corporate Requirements
Office SharePoint Server 2007 will enable CGI IBS to comply with corporate requirements by building those requirements into the workflow. For example, for proposals that are over a certain budget amount, specific individuals need to maximize oversight, approve the proposal, and ensure its success. The appropriate individuals can be notified automatically with e-mail alerts as soon as the financial characteristic of the bid has been identified. This automatic feature will provide an easy way for CGI IBS to be compliant with the CGI corporate framework.
Through document-life tracking, CGI IBS will also be able to manage compliance and audits. Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables tracking and historic control of proposal creation, review, and approval. The expiration and retention policies of the program will allow CGI IBS sales personnel to carefully track proposal content.
Appropriate Security Levels for All Proposal Documentation
CGI IBS will be able to use enhanced security features to safeguard the fidelity of all proposal documentation. Since many people are involved in developing the proposal and will contribute content at different times, using Office SharePoint Server 2007 will enable CGI IBS to help ensure appropriate security levels. Employees can define document management and compliance policies through access rights at a per-item and per-user level to manage security concerns. For example, access rights can be defined for users to read, edit, print, or share the proposal.
Benefits
By implementing a 2007 Microsoft Office system–based solution, CGI IBS expects to experience several improvements in its proposal generation process. Using the new automated workflow and document collaboration solution, CGI IBS sales professionals will be able to respond to new business opportunities faster, and improve the quality of those responses. See Figure 3 for detailed information on key performance indicators for the proposal generation process.
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| Figure 3. Expected impact of the key performance indicators for the proposal generation process |
Reduced Average Cost of Proposal Development
The Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 solution will enable CGI IBS to decrease its average cost of proposal development. By making it easier to reuse content, work in teams, collaborate with people from multiple offices and locations, proposal creation can be completed more quickly. Speeding up the process will ultimately decrease the average cost of proposal development.
Improved Compliance with Corporate Proposal Processes
By automating notifications for individuals in certain roles to review specific characteristics during the proposal process, CGI IBS can more easily comply with the CGI corporate framework.
Built-in notifications not only will help ensure that the right individuals are being notified, but also that they are involved in the process early on. This early access to documents and their details helps ensure that issues and areas of improvement in the proposal are addressed and resolved in a timely manner.
Improved Proposal Quality
The new solution will enable CGI IBS to create better quality proposals by increasing the sales presence with clients. By accelerating proposal turnaround time, sales professionals will increase time with clients and, in turn, better understand their business needs. More time with the client will also help sales professionals to better cater the proposal to the client when designing the solution and response to a bid.
Additionally, past and present proposal content will be available from the centralized library for sales personnel to search for best-in-class proposal content and reuse it in other proposals. Directories provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007 will make it easier to search for the right documents.
Increased Win Rate
Streamlining the proposal process, improving the quality of the proposals, and increasing the amount of time that can be spent in front of the client will help CGI IBS increase its win rate.
Improved Employee Morale
By reducing the amount of administrative tasks, paperwork, and travel required to successfully create a proposal, CGI IBS expects to increase the job satisfaction of its sales employees. Sales teams can collaborate without having to travel to meet face-to-face. They can be productive even when they are not working together in a central location since geographical boundaries are no longer a constraint.
The CGI IBS management team also expects an increase in employee morale and satisfaction because sales personnel will be able to play a more integral part in the proposal generation process.
By streamlining the proposal generation process, CGI IBS will not only reduce costs, it will also allow sales teams to collaborate more effectively. Increased sales presence in front of clients will enable them to design solutions that match the needs and exceed the expectations of the client to build better responses.
“Spending less time on proposal development will enable us to build better responses, increase time spent on designing the solution, and, ultimately, increase our win rate,” says Beck.
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
About Business Value Assessment
This business value research study was developed by Capgemini using the Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) Framework to assess the business value of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
For information on how to repeat this study for your organization, contact your local Microsoft representative or go to:
www.microsoft.com/value
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about CGI Insurance Business Services products and services visit the Web site at:
www.cgi.com
