Marketing industry
Calculating the costs for an important online campaign for a DAX corporate group in the automotive sector (corporate group with more than 10k employees worldwide) represents a major challenge for an SME within marketing.
If not all of the technical requirements including acceptance tolerances are taken into account when calculating the quotation, the calculated budget and delivery schedule cannot be met later in the project.
The problem:
The first large order from an SME within marketing is associated with many risks. If the calculation of the quotation is incorrect or incomplete and the client’s organisation is much larger than the SME’s organisation, these problems can subsequently jeopardise the existence of the SME.
The challenge:
due to technical complexity, all of the services approved by Sales for the customer (establishing print and media campaign, establishing online campaign, supervising the integration of the online campaign for existing customer, retailer and supplier systems) can lead to an inadequate estimation of workload, capacity resource planning and scheduling of the migration for the individual components.
Solution: (Lean CTQ, Lean Kano, estimation model)
The employees in the departments involved are trained in the cost estimate system with estimation models (according to the “COSMIC full function point” ISO standard method), Lean CTQ and Kano model.
In collaboration with the Marketing and Software team, the estimate tables are created with the corresponding estimate objects. For each feature of the “online campaign”,
- The estimate objects are created and described
- The acceptance conditions including tolerances are recorded per estimate object
- The Kano model is described per estimate object
- The workload in hours and the calculation method are created per estimate objec.
Result
The result is the total of all effort involved in delivering the agreed features in hours and a transparent division of tasks for the team..
If the actual project workload during a project is booked to the estimate objects, an ongoing post-calculation is possible for project controlling.
Even if corporate groups demand a great deal from the SME in terms of price, this method helps to localise and implement possible optimisation potential in the project organisation.
The following services were implemented in the online campaign: SSO services, user profile management, master data management for technical vehicle data, integration services for dealer systems, data quality services to clean up duplicates, plug-in services for existing ERP systems to exchange article and vehicle data.
Once the project was completed, the post-calculation in hours resulted in a difference of 3.5% from the target.
The company will continue to use this method in the future.
