Case Studies

The Problem

This distribution center was encountering inefficiencies associated with the turnaround time on orders, order tracking, employee productivity, and turnover.

What the management team needed was a way to gain visibility into the performance of each warehouse without affecting employee morale and culture. They wanted to create a fun method for analyzing individual performance to tweak the system to improve turnaround time and drive down costs.

The Idea

Our supply chain experts observed the work environment to better understand how employees performed their jobs. What they found was that every warehouse did things a little differently, and visibility across the board could streamline and standardize processes.

The idea for solving the problem was centered on the development of a custom application that digitally transformed the environment, allowing management and staff to have real-time visibility into picks, packs, and shipping. Instead of just studying the numbers, the Tridius team suggested placing flat screen TVs in all the warehouse locations, displaying individual employee performance from a dashboard view. If they could gamify the process and incentivize employees to compete, productivity would naturally go up and employees would have fun in the process.

The Outcome

Sure enough, it worked!

The implementation of the custom software package rapidly improved turnaround times and helped resolve tracking issues quickly. Employee productivity goals were quickly realized and felt throughout the entire organization with improved culture and productivity levels.

Management too got what they needed to gain visibility into employee performance with the ability to baseline and make continuous improvements.

The Problem

This client is a law group who specializes in providing tax and accounting advisory services for high net worth individuals. The organization services people around the globe and has quickly become a trusted brand for thousands of clients. The company headquarters is in Toronto, Ontario, with offices in London, England, and Bangkok, Thailand. Over the past 15 years, the company has expanded at a record-setting pace while maintaining high standards of customer service and delivering high-quality services

The Idea

To keep up with the client’s demands, the company developed a custom application many years ago. However, years of growth placed tremendous pressure on the app and adjacent business processes. Moreover, the app was becoming a restraint and beginning to impact their organization from two perspectives. First, customer service was starting to deteriorate as the application was unable to keep up with governmental regulations and changing client requirements. Second, the organization was hesitant to add new clients to the system with the preexisting issues. The net result was a situation impacting existing clients while also restricting the growth of the company.

As Tridius began to engage, our team discovered that specific deadlines drive a majority of the law group’s business. Unfortunately, the design of the existing application created a pool of disparate data, which resulted in missed deadlines, errors, and significantly higher labor costs. To work around these issues, employees started creating sub-systems. However, this further compounded the problem, making it extremely difficult to manage client workstreams.

While business processes existed, most of the functions were labor-intensive. The law group was also suffering from a lack of automation.
The lack of automation created an environment of rising labor costs, reduced
margins, and downward trending customer service. Their growth made it challenging to scale business operations without incurring a significant increase in overhead.

The Outcome

Working closely with the customer, Tridius, was able to gain insight into the depth of the problem. Our team was able to grasp how the law group engaged with clients and how transactions moved through the organization. Solving the problem would require a significant investment and for them to embark on a large digital transformation project. So, Tridius had to architect a multi-phased project to develop a solution that would not interrupt ongoing operations.

To accomplish this objective, Tridius laid out a five-phase program. The program covers a twenty-four-month period leveraging the Microsoft Dynamics platform. Microsoft Dynamics was chosen for its flexibility to integrate and automate numerous business processes. It would give the law group a single system of record and client management while allowing the business to scale to new heights.