Case Studies

The MDER offers companies and decision-makers help in the following categories: Technology, management, industry, market development, trade agreements, industrial, sectoral and regional development and entrepreneurship. Products and services offered by the MDER are grouped together according to area of activity. These include promotion and awareness, professional and technical support, financial assistance, partnerships, and legislation management. The MDER is involved at the following levels: Innovation, Management, Market Development, Production, Cooperative Development, Student Placement, Social Economics and others.

The following three objectives were the key focus areas of the project:

• Put in place an integrated solution supported by a robust
  infrastructure capable of evolving for many years
• Improve the efficiency of the MDER’s service offering by enabling all
  departments to share information related to the clients and the related
  requests
• Facilitate the management and coordination of all activities and enable
  strategic planning, by offering an integrated environment for all users
  and provide views and reports to track budgets and timelines
  

The Challenge

The main challenge which brought the implementation of Siebel’s Public Sector Sales solution was the fact that various groups were working on different levels with the same clients, but were using data that was located in over 20 different systems. The information on a client was not shared consistently and the communication of activities between the various groups was becoming crucial to the efficient achievement of the MDER’s mission. Also, the requirements of the various groups were often significantly different. The project team therefore had to integrate the data from the various systems as well as make sure that the solution deployed to the users would enable the management of clients, contacts, projects, activities, events, budgets and results through a common application while supporting the different requirements of each group.

In partnership with TELUS, Skura Corporation consultants worked closely with the MDER’s resources to analyze their current processes and identify opportunities of improvement for the new system. The team then produced business requirements, technical requirements and design documents for the new application. The team also configured the application based on the design documents. A significant number of new objects (new tables, screens, views, …) had to be created to support the MDER’s business requirements. For example, due to the fact that the different groups (regional, international, industrial, …) of the MDER often have specific needs in terms of tracking various elements of information on a client, the Accounts screen had to be expanded to close to 200 fields. In addition, training sessions were delivered for the MDER’s trainers, in partnership with Big Knowledge, and various knowledge transfer activities were organized for the project team members (configurators and business analysts).

Siebel Public Sector Sales was implemented as the backbone of the information infrastructure and now acts as the main portal for information related to customers, projects, budgets and events.

Departments got immediate payback as they can now visualise the whole picture around a client and it is now possible to see all of the interventions made by each department, by activity and by client. Also, the fact that all the information is now available in one system often improves the Search possibilities and reduces the time required to get information.
With the new, integrated solution in place, the MDER is now able to provide customers with a better service and it is much easier to plan and combine efforts and strategies.

Budgets, activites, strategies are all accessible through a common interface. Key information about the customer is readily available in a timely fashion and the solution is much more user friendly, offering a common approach across the organization.

• Greatly improve access to customer information
• Improve on sharing of customer and program information
  across the organization
• Better plan activities, resulting in a more efficient
  utilization of budget and resources according to priorities
• Better track feedback on activities
• Faster, streamlined operations to process client requests
• Have a centralized view of key elements, through the
  implementation of a Home Page functionality
• Have a scalable solution capable of evolving with the
  MDER’s needs