Case Study

J. Ray McDermott reduces training time 50% for new sales executives

During the last 15 years, J. Ray McDermott, Inc. grew into a leading provider of worldwide marine solutions, operating in 20 countries with a diverse fleet of vessels serving the marine construction industry.

As McDermott grew, so did their need for technology for forecasting and scheduling vessel projects. For years, the company relied on an internally developed, user-unfriendly CRM platform they called BDS (Business Development System), which eventually became obsolete. Years of change brought with them a need for greater global visibility into larger, more complex projects.

Astadia partnership and early momentum with Salesforce.com
 

Like many early adopters of Cloud Computing, McDermott started with a project of manageable size, gained early success, then built on that success.

The marine solutions giant first partnered with Astadia to customize 20 seats of Salesforce.com Professional Edition. This pilot project enabled tracking of project activities and capturing project information such as:

• phone calls with clients
• client and industry meetings
• man hours
• competitor intelligence
• major barge days
• field dates
• financial data

Gaining momentum from this CRM pilot, McDermott decided a year later to reengage Astadia while determining next steps to extract value from the Salesforce.com platform.

From Client-Server Architecture to Cloud Computing
 

Astadia realized that a number of solutions McDermott wanted could be hosted in the Cloud and stay in Salesforce.com. This benefitted McDermott in several ways. The company had established success with Salesforce.com. With a Cloud solution, McDermott’s internal IT staff wouldn’t need to perform server maintenance and upgrades. Web access was already available, so communication with McDermott’s executives and sales team could be faster and more seamless.

Many Cloud Computing projects start from scratch (no existing applications) or move data back and forth between technology tools. With McDermott, Astadia analyzed an established client-server application, designed a new technical solution, and migrated the data to the new platform.

Astadia identified Salesforce.com’s Unlimited Edition as the best platform for McDermott’s growing needs. McDermott chose to upgrade from 20 to nearly 100 licenses.

Benefits of a Salesforce.com upgrade
 

With the CRM upgrade, McDermott set out to facilitate the move toward global business development standard processes, procedures, and data collection. They needed a worldwide CRM application and prospect tracking solution. The scope included enhancing their existing Salesforce.com tool by developing and implementing custom objects and controls, security, reports, and performing data conversion and migration from BDS.

Working collaboratively with Astadia, their goals for the enhanced CRM included:

A 360 degree view of customers and projects: including Work Activities, construction and marine opportunities, Competitor Yards and Vessels, Contacts, and News Records.

Advanced reporting and dashboards: ability to capture analytics of the company’s data including sales initiatives, trends, and exceptions -- and view the data in organized and user-friendly formats.

Secure access: have global read-only access for specific users to see Projects, Work Activities, and Customer Contact Reports (CCRs). Allow administrators and power users to view proprietary information on a global and regional level along with the ability to delete and edit information.

Mobile and offline access: enable users to access Salesforce.com data from project sites and other remote locations outside the company. Let users edit data even when a wireless connection is unavailable, and transmit those changes securely when a wireless connection becomes available.

“Our sales reps’ willingness to participate in initial discussions (which were several) in comparing our current system with Salesforce.com was very appreciated. As with any systems initiative, you do not know what you do not know, especially if you come from the user side,” says Pat Clancy, Client Services Manager, J. Ray McDermott, Inc., Houston.

Discovery Findings, Analysis, Technology Selection
 

During discovery, Astadia listened to the challenges McDermott described, then analyzed and built solutions around each of the existing challenges.  These issues surfaced:

• Excess time spent gathering project and work activity data from global sales team
• Poor data quality due to business development and sales information going through multiple people
• Difficult for operations to forecast and schedule yard and vessel resources
• Duplicate data entry with Outlook and BDS

Specific CRM issues emerged as Astadia learned more about BDS, including:

• Unusable on a global basis:  the sales team didn’t have visibility into each sales status or competitors and contacts, which lead to inefficiency in the sales process.
• Limited reporting capabilities: having a report run could take days because the server was in Dubai and approvals had to be granted before reports could go into the IT’s report queue.
• Operated slowly for users: With a server in Dubai and operations running out of Houston, the system took a long time to load and extract data.
• Lacked global visibility into opportunities and projects: with 5 business units inside the company, information was included on a template, checked to see if each section of the company had the shared definitions, then consolidated in Houston. The process to extract important data often took days.
• Lacked level of depth needed: unable to show data about each bid, utilization rates, marine days for each vessel, and other pertinent project details.
• Constant fear of system “going down”: if the system crashed, historical data could potentially be unavailable for days or weeks or until IT support or another IT specialty team could extract and export data.

As Astadia analyzed McDermott’s business processes, the team discovered that in BDS, McDermott was extracting information into an unexpectedly large quantity of incredibly important, highly detailed Excel-based reports. These reports became a challenge for the customization project because McDermott was doing a large amount of analysis and had so many specific Excel formats.
 

Understanding the business, and making the technology serve the requirements

“Astadia was an excellent facilitator in getting down to what the real business requirements were. They understand the capabilities of what Salesforce.com can do,” says Pat Clancy, Client Services Manager, J. Ray McDermott, Inc., Houston.

Astadia began by designing a technical solution to match McDermott’s detailed business and operational forecasting requirements.

As the details emerged, the team settled on a set of Excel exports that they would use to pull data out of Salesforce.com. This enabled McDermott to continue using their existing Excel formatting and analysis tools with minimum process disruption. Astadia also built Salesforce.com dashboards so McDermott could view the data in new ways.

Astadia helped automate the creation of project planning and man-hour forecasts using VisualForce S-Control Customizations. Astadia also transformed McDermott’s cleansed and deduped data into Salesforce.com objects. After multiple data migrations, Astadia was able to move McDermott’s accounts, contacts, projects, work activities, news items, and CCRs into the new application.

“Astadia’s technical consultants were a tremendous resource during our Salesforce.com data migration and JRM Salesforce.com configuration. They are excellent facilitators and members of our team,” says Pat Clancy, Client Services Manager, J. Ray McDermott, Inc., Houston.

Training users in new cloud technology tool
 

Before the configuration was complete, Astadia held training meetings with all potential McDermott users to highlight business requirements, review why they are using the system, and what it could do. User testing was performed by going through scenarios used in existing cases.

This preliminary process had a lot to do with the success in the adoption of Salesforce.com, and gave it credibility from the beginning.

Users involved in the initial meetings then trained other users with Astadia’s help. Awareness training was performed, showing how the information is captured and all of the system’s capabilities.

After completing development and training, Astadia deployed the enhanced Salesforce.com solution to McDermott’s global user base including their sales team, executive sales management team, and users in operations, service, and sales support roles.

“If we wouldn’t have had Astadia, there’s no way we’d be where we are,” says Pat Clancy, Client Services Manager, J. Ray McDermott, Inc., Houston.

Results: better productivity, pricing margins, user adoption, and security

Cut time out of business processes: reduce days of work to minutes!   Both productivity and efficiency improved. McDermott saves substantial time in recurring business processes and ad hoc requests alike.  Simply finding out what bids were won and lost used to take days to complete. Now when the Vice President of Business Development needs to know how many bids were won in a given time period, it only takes a few hours to find out, instead of several days. To quickly and effectively track data, run reports, view contacts and clients, and pull mailing lists has made all the difference.

Reduce training time by 50%.  McDermott’s time to ramp new sales executives has been greatly reduced by using the customized Astadia cloud solution. Training new users on the system is straight-forward and simple thanks to Astadia’s training guidelines. With better access to competitor data, company and contact information, and improved organization processes, sales reps are now able to get up to speed in half the time!   

Reduce support headcount by 50%.  McDermott has efficiently and effectively supported a global system while significantly reducing support headcount for business development, sales, and administration.  

Improved security with better user authentication and access control.   McDermott no longer has user access security concerns because the approval process and security features are built into the system. Users have access to data they need, and that’s all. The system also doesn’t taunt users with grayed-out fields or references to deactivated functionality.  Whatever is outside a user’s security profile is simply invisible to that user.

Improved margins.  Competitor tracking has improved margins by enabling smarter pricing decisions. Bids are drafted more efficiently and the pricing process has improved worldwide.  

Improved sales process and user adoption.  With Astadia’s business process analysis and customization work, McDermott’s sales personnel now have better processes. They can easily locate contact, company, and competitor information instead of finding it in multiple places that previously required phone calls, emails, and conversations. They now see who is calling on whom. Repetitive work is eliminated. Since users understand how they benefit from Salesforce.com functionality, adoption rates are quite high.   

Increase in executive visibility into global forecasting.  McDermott administrators and executives now view analyzed data quickly and effectively. They can see dashboard layouts of reports in pie charts, tables, and other formats that simplify forecasting.  Preparing for Board meetings, staffing projects, and managing processes are all easier.  

“What Astadia brought to us is the realization and final product that works for J. Ray McDermott,” says Pat Clancy, Client Services Manager, J. Ray McDermott, Inc., Houston.

Successful partnership and solution!
 

With Astadia’s guidance and customization work, McDermott has an agile system that keeps pace with a changing business. They now have a worldwide on-demand CRM application that supports global business development processes, procedures, and data collection. With a 360 degree view of the company from contacts to projects, advanced reporting, and secure access, McDermott competes more effectively. Mobile and offline access has given them the ability to view data anywhere in the world, advancing their reach into marine solutions around the globe.