Case Study Clean Team (The Tale of the CRM)

Client:

Clean Team is a social enterprise in partnership with Unilever and WSUP..

Business Model: Clean Team rents households an attractive, branded portable toilet and collects the waste 3 times per week. Once at their central processing facility, they transport the waste to the municipal treatment site. The plan for scale is to use a financially viable business model supplying a waste removal service and charging a subscription fee which will allow Clean Team to grow without external support.

Summary of Challenge/Problem Space

The Clean Team needed a  Business System aimed at creating a Customer Relationship Management System(CRM) with mobile integration to support the core business functions  of tracking potential customer queries, customer sales , and facilitating the efficient coordination of the activities of Clean Team’s mobile workforce.

EDEL Technology Consulting was contracted to conduct work with multiple stakeholders to clearly articulate departmental as well as company requirements and also provide technical consultation  on system readiness and software quality assurance for the development of the CRM.

Solution and approach

Requirement Determination and Analysis

• The EDEL Technology Team spent the first few weeks travelling with the Clean Team Sales team on their business development and sales trips documenting the interactions, processes and data collected.
• We also travelled with collectors from 5am daily on their collections of portable sanitation units to understand the customer service needs of Clean Team.
• We then conducted interviews with in office team to elicit business processes and gain understanding of how the business works to ensure any system built meets the needs and provides the greatest return on investment.

Selection of Appropriate System.

Several factors were considered in the selection process; functionality, ease of use, real-time, performance and scalability/configurability. About 50% of the users of the system have very little to no education. This implied that a great emphasis be placed on simplicity (to afford users minimal interaction with the system).

Signing of contract: EDEL Technology Consulting provided Clean Team with a contract proposal which they can use to make demands on technical teams in the future. Based on this proposal, a new contract was renegotiated and signed for development to commence.

Outcome and Impact

Revised requirements/Better Software: The first set of requirements was quite vague and did not cover 60% of the company’s operations (only waste collectors and account managers can use the system). Edel Technology Consulting involvement led to the creation of a new set of system requirements that cover all operations in the company (sales officers, waste collectors, account managers, operations staff and administrators were now included). Functionalities and processes were now clearly elicited

Cost savings: Based on the vagueness of the initial requirement, Clean team would have spent about $12,000 per year of operation with 24 users. An analysis of the projected operating costs involved was conducted and presented to the project manager; this led to a lowering of development cost less than 50%.

Time: Due to the well laid out requirements, phase one of the system would be developed in 31 working days (which was an improvement on the earlier duration of 91 days presented by earlier companies).