Commerce Improvement Cycle (SM)

Implementation

Our Point of View

Any commerce improvement program will entail some combination of business process design, deployment of commercial or custom software applications, system integration, data clean-up and restructuring, and organizational realignments. Regardless of the scope of the program, the core team must remain aware of, and incorporate into the plan, several important considerations:

Managing project risks by anticipating problems, developing creative solutions, recommending a course of action, and escalating key decisions to the management steering team
Effective coordination with the IT group, third-party vendors, company subject matter experts, and all program stakeholders
Control the scope of the project over its entire lifecycle to ensure that program objectives and ROI targets are met without sacrificing critical functionality

To keep the cost and timetable to a minimum, the team must be staffed with resources that have extensive experience in the process areas, the types of technology being used, and the nature of the data that will need to be incorporated and managed in the deployed solution.

Our Approach

eLogic has extensive experience in commerce improvement projects, and as a consequence has developed a thorough implementation methodology tailored to B2B commerce issues. Several fundamental elements are used to manage the entire lifecycle of the program:

Project Kick-off
This step introduces the major implementation activities and issues to all project stakeholders. The roadmap, project plan, communication plan, issues management plan, goals and objectives, and critical success factors are reviewed with the core team and steering committee.
Project Pilot Stage
The goal of this stage is to clearly demonstrate that the identified solution will satisfactorily address all critical and important business requirements. eLogic works closely with the core team to define the scope of a pilot effort, which only involves a subset of the commercial and product data. At the end of the pilot, the team will review the results and update the remaining stages of the plan accordingly.
Project Metrics
Project success in not just a matter of being on time and on budget, though these are critical items. A project also needs to have clearly stated quantified business goals, such as a 50 percent reduction cost per quote or a 90 percent reduction in commerce transaction processing time. Only by having appropriate, measurable metrics, can you clearly demonstrate the success of your B2B Commerce implementation. We work with the core team to continuously monitor this information on an ongoing basis.
Product Data Modeling
This area of commerce projects is often overlooked because it is assumed to be simple and straightforward. But properly representing product data in a commerce application will require taking into account all of the consumers of product information, and what specific requirements each one has. eLogic's Product Data Analysts have extensive experience collecting, evaluating, restructuring, and modeling your product data. To ensure that data is both accurate and appropriate to its intended use, we employ a series of proprietary analytical tools for evaluating the completeness and integrity of the data.
Process Definition
Your commerce business processes need to be able to support all products and all sales channel partners. These processes need to be flexible enough to handle many combinations of commercial process and product complexity. Our Business Analysts use eLogic's SIPOC methodology to identify detailed process requirements, map them against the application functionality, and define an optimal business process solution.
Migration Planning
Which group of users should be targeted as "early adopters" and why? Should you use a "big bang" approach to migrating your products to the new commerce solution, or stage them in gradually in a specific order? Is it more appropriate to introduce integration functions in small steps, or will there be too much "throwaway" work? eLogic and the core team develop an appropriate plan for smoothly migrating from the current environment. This plan takes into account the needs of sales channel partners, key back-office constraints, and the need to maximize the return on investment.
Application Integration
eLogic develops an integration architecture that takes into account current integration capabilities such as middleware tools, EAI tools, SOA capability, and vendor B2B Commerce integration tools. We develop, test, and deploy the appropriate integration components in accordance with this architecture.
Program Oversight and Review
Communication is another critical factor for a successful implementation. eLogic regularly review the status of the project, identify potential problems, recommend corrective action, and manage the change approval process with the project steering team. We conduct these periodic reviews ensure that the goals are achieved within the expected benefits framework.
Knowledge Transfer
eLogic's implementation goal is not to ensure long term involvement with the commerce improvement initiative. As a consequence, we make certain that your team is self-sufficient before the end of the implementation. We believe the best approach for achieving this goal is to gradually increase the level of participation of your resources while gradually decreasing eLogic resource involvement. Defining new business processes, designing new data structures, and setting up application software are not likely to be core competencies in your company. But once these critical tasks are complete, the core team can begin to learn about the solution and take ownership for ongoing support and improvement.

Strategic Concepts

Implementation

Our Point of View

Our Approach