Overview
A five-star global outsourcing management consulting & advisory firm focused on transforming the power of technology into great business strategies was looking to plug leakages using a relevant IT solution. The firm specializes in offering digital and IT transformation, sourcing advisory, global strategy, governance services, delivering high-value engagements through industry focused innovation and flexible client based solutions. Recognized as ‘World’s Best Outsourcing Advisors’ by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) for seven consecutive years, the client was keen on offering IT solution to its customers to plug leakages in outsourcing contracts.
Challenges
The client specialized in offering outsourcing governance services to end customers that involved auditing of service level management and monitoring of business processes. The audit required analyzing hundreds of existing contracts along with monitoring of performance of thousands of SLAs. Identifying significant value leakages ranging from 2-5% of the total contract value owing to lack of proper performance management. Looking forward to finding a proper IT-backed solution for improving visibility in performance management, the end customer engaged Nividous to plug leaks through relevant IT solutions.
Solution
Nividous designed a complete governance solution providing required performance management and analytical tools for simplifying license and services contract management and enabling strategic decision making in the organization. The IT solution designed by Nividous consisted of an integrated system of modules that enabled full lifecycle management of licenses and services contracts for various types of sourcing transactions. Using ultra-advanced integration of different platforms for various functions, the solution enabled managed governance services across the organization. The solution used analytics based on Pentaho BI, governance process automation based on jBPM and contract repository based on jack-Rabbit.
With highly-configurable analytics dashboards, slice and dice feature to monitor contract performance and take remedial actions by vendor manager using reports, the IT solution served as a complete package for the client. Some of the features of the IT tool, included:
- Comprehensive issue, risk and action item management and governance features based on task and roles
- Contract repository and document management system for all contracts, financial/performance data and documents
- Audit trail feature to manage compliances
- Quick and easy access to vital sourcing contract attributes
- Highly-configurable analytics, dashboards and reporting systems
- Configurable and automated vendor management and governance process workflows with alerts and notifications
The tool had separate modules for various tasks and each module had the following core features:
- Role-based dashboards and reporting
- Creating and organizing complex dashboards, reports, SLAs and scorecards easily without involvement of IT
- Real-time drill down system to monthly/weekly/daily performance reports across multiple dimensions like projects, cost centers, business units and region.
- Workflow processes
- Automating, monitoring and approving agreements and tracking compliances according to best practice processes
- Detailed audit trails for all processes
- SLA management
- SLA creation and monitoring from SLA dashboards
- Root cause and business impact report generation for identifying remedial action
- Automatic alerts for SLAs in-danger of being missed
- Document management
- Built-in document management repository to allow full-text search and keyword, concept and contract data display
- Contract information viewing feature for checking audit trails and contract status for contract documents
By using IT solution developed and designed by Nividous, the client was able to significantly add value to its services proposal for end-customers. After implementation of the contract management solution, several end-customers reported more than 90% reduction in conflicts and contract leakages owing to transparent dealings with vendor partners and clearer visibility of contract performance.