If you thought that your business project delivery was too complex to be managed by a simple, intuitive solution, then think again. Satellite operator SES’s usage of Taskfeed X Precursive proves that Salesforce is the perfect platform for your people and project challenges. Amy Grenham from Taskfeed takes us through it.
HOW SATELLITE OPERATOR, SES, LAUNCH THEIR CUSTOMERS WITH TASKFEED AND PRECURSIVE
Have you ever wondered how satellites are launched into orbit? They literally hitch a lift on a rocket.
It sounds so simple put in those terms.
Of course, in reality it’s not. Sending several tonnes of metal into space, keeping it there and managing this technology from Earth to provide a connectivity service, well it’s about as complex as it gets.
That’s what SES do. Their business is the launch and management of a fleet of telecommunications satellites, relied upon 24/7 by a range of customers for their connectivity solutions.
OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD PROJECT MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES
As you can probably guess, bringing a new customer onboard for SES to deliver data services is a finely tuned operation. Very specific tasks must be performed by the correct, highly specialised individual at the right time. When you are operating with a team of this calibre, being able to see who is doing what, where and when is critical.
As with all projects, they often encounter changes as plans alter given the complexity of the work. Timings will need adjusting, a person will need redeploying, a client deadline may change. The variables are endless, but the solution is always the same - the SES team need absolute clarity and visibility from their project and personnel management tools, across a global portfolio of projects.
Imagine overseeing a global workforce of field engineers and multiple concurrent projects across multiple geographical locations (often in remote regions of the planet). Finally, factor in the need to keep budgets under control across every one of these resources, on every one of these projects. Delays can massively affect revenues.
In short, highly skilled satellite and network engineers don’t come cheap and the costs attached to project delays can be astronomical and therefore affect margins.
IT'S COMPLICATED. HOWEVER, THE TOOLS DON'T NEED TO BE
While the service that the SES team carries out is highly specialised, the project management and resourcing challenges they face are actually surprisingly universal: they need the right people in the right place at the right time, delivering on requirements, on budget.
Complex project management challenges do not need further complication from the technology they run on. What they actually need is simplicity: tools that do the heavy lifting in the background, while they focus on what’s really important.
That’s why SES have found the answer in an easy to use solution: Precursive X Taskfeed.
EASY, INTUITIVE, ALL-IN-ONE PROJECT RESOURCING AND MANAGEMENT ON SALESFORCE, FOR FAST MOVING TEAMS
“We wanted as much automation as possible in terms of project management task allocation. Now very little additional work is required by the project managers.”
The seamless integration of Customer Onboarding tool Taskfeed, with resource management solution Precursive is down to the fact that each of these technologies operate natively on the Salesforce platform. Effectively, they work as one. The combined effect of the two products is a complete end-to-end solution for SES, delivering on every aspect of the project infrastructure required, right from the initial customer kick off through to project completion.
“We wanted as much automation as possible in terms of project management task allocation. Now very little additional work is required by the project managers,” explains Richie Vella, Head of PMO describing their project setup process.
Richie’s team work with several predefined templates for their initial implementation, activated at the press of a button. The project tasks and resource requirements are automatically populated within Salesforce, at which point the team working on the project will receive notification of exactly what is required and when.
Throughout the install process, SES can continue to rely on Taskfeed x Precursive to work in a responsive and agile way to provide all the scheduling, planning and project analytics they need to launch their service successfully.
“It's easy to manage, easy for programme managers to have sight of all the projects and easy to extract reports and data to build into higher analytics showing the efficiencies that are being made in the project.”
Management of budgets is also high on SES’s list of requirements.
“We needed a way for project managers to manage the profit and loss on their projects,” explains Richie, “now they can enter their budgets for that project and as they go through the project lifecycle, it’s possible to see where the costs are mounting up and where they need to take action.”
FASTER TIME TO VALUE
Well run delivery teams can have a direct impact on business performance by ensuring that the gap between starting a project and going live is as short as possible. Closing this gap can create stratospheric improvements in revenue and profitability. Ultimately, the main KPI the team wanted to see improve was the time from project kick off to service commencement.
Using Precursive and Taskfeed, they have done just that - the average delivery time has reduced by 40% with the automation of their processes, therefore, bringing in revenue earlier.
Small steps can indeed bring giant leaps when they are followed in the right way.
ARE YOU READY FOR LIFT OFF?
Any business offering high value, technically complex products and services knows that customer launch is a challenge (even if you are not actually sending anyone into orbit).
If you think that you would benefit from your own Salesforce-powered control centre for managing your operations then get in touch today and we can give you a demo of exactly how Precursive x Taskfeed can help you deliver value more quickly in one easy to use, end to end solution.
Get in touch today at either hello@precursive.com or click here to contact Taskfeed.
