Basic Planning Solutions Analysis

Basic Planning Solutions (BPS) is a consulting firm that services manufacturers. BPS analyzes customer spending, identifies ways to save money, and implements projects to achieve these savings (Wheelwright & Schmidt, 2011). BPS expanded operations by acquiring more narrowly focused companies and then integrating parts of each operation to form cohesive standards. Although BPS found early success in the industry they began to face many sales issues and customer service issues. In 2010, their win rate, or the number of sales closed on sales opportunities was projected to be 15.5% which was a full 2% below their forecast. This was also going to affect their sales for the next few years as most customers signed 3 year contracts. Even worse was the decline in renewal contracts from over 90% to 84%. What was causing these issues?

These issues appear to be based on internal systems and processes. The sales people feel that they do not receive timely assistance from Sales Support. Team structure and organization are also creating issues and appear to be stretching the Sales Support Team too thin. The team is also struggling to meet proposal deadlines which affect performance and customer service. BPS has also given each team within the Sales Support Team the same responsibilities and Chuck Dee, the team manager feels that this does not allow the team to focus on one aspect but rather creates a backlog of trying to cover all areas of responsibility, often leading to missed deadlines.

The various feedback loops that I created show the relationship between sales team performance, sales team structure, and customer satisfaction. I would suggest creating one team that focuses on data engineering and data analysis for the energy team, one team that focuses on this data for the government team, one for the manufacturing team, and one for retail and other. I would then have one team for each unit that focuses on proposal support and one team for each unit that...