Client background

This not-for-profit organization operates federally funded research and development centers (FFRDC) and public-private partnerships. FFRDCs are unique organizations that assist the United States government with scientific research and analysis, development and acquisition and systems engineering and integration.

The business challenge

Our client was operating with a siloed approach to forecasting including the financial pipeline and personnel resourcing. Additionally, a decentralized capture and management of their business pursuit and lack of process standards diminished the organization’s ability to drive focused pursuit strategies toward softer performance areas in their sales pipeline, as well as gain early visibility on key resource constraints to pivot to work execution and revenue realization.

While the organization had Salesforce.com licenses, the tool had not been established as an enterprise standard across various business units. The lack of developed software processes minimized the ability to properly capture data causing business units to leverage different tools to track and manage their opportunity pipelines.

The Baker Tilly approach

Baker Tilly was engaged to assess the existing landscape for opportunity pipeline management and collaborate with a broad client team to initiate their transformation process. Our approach included:

• Developing future state recommendations including process transformation opportunities to define how the organization would successfully transition stakeholders to Salesforce.com
• Executing foundational change management activities and articulating an enterprise data/integration architecture to improve collaborative execution and support corporate forecasting
• Creating future state process architecture, delivering persona-based journey maps for key business constituents

The business impact

The Baker Tilly team acted as a strategic advisor, developing the operational strategy and initiating the client’s future state design and program planning for their opportunity pipeline management transformation. The impact included:

• A clear understanding of the current state operations across business units, related pain points, and opportunities for transformation
• An implementation plan and strategy with considerations for cross transformation program dependencies, including new data/integration architectural components necessary to realize the transformation
• An accelerated ability to execute the plan and bring value to stakeholders, including centralized data capture, financial forecasting and early demand signaling to inform human resources