Helping an online marketplace improve their global expansion process
How A Change in Latitude Consulting (ACIL) helped one of the world’s fastest growing online marketplace and resellers optimize and standardize their global expansion process.
One of the world’s fastest growing online marketplaces reached out to A Change in Latitude Consulting to lead efforts to streamline the process used to open new sites around the world. The company had realized triple digit growth the past few years, opening new sites around the world on a quarterly basis, but needed help to streamline the process. The company chose ACIL because we have consultants with more than twenty years of experience documenting the current state, working with team members to find improvement opportunities, then documenting and implementing more efficient ways of operating.
The Challenge:
ACIL had worked closely with some company executives previously and was eager to collaborate on this project. We immediately met with key stakeholders involved in the global expansion process. The process, as it was currently operating, was challenging due to the number of stakeholders involved and the pace at which the company was growing. The ACIL consultants met individually with close to twenty stakeholders of the process, gathering information on how the process currently worked, including what they perceived to be working well and what challenges the teams faced. There were then multiple workshops involving the entire team where ACIL reviewed the “current state” with the team and discussed opportunities. Once the team had the “current state” documented and all opportunities identified, work on the “future”, more ideal state begun. Within 45 days, ACIL consultants had produced a new process the client stakeholders had aligned on and created a standard work document the organization was able to implement immediately.
The Results:
ACIL’s consultants were able to work collaboratively with process owners to get all key stakeholders aligned on the new global expansion process. At the beginning of the project, there was not agreement between all stakeholders on what the process was or what it should be. Through our team’s collaborative engagement, all stakeholders fully aligned on the new process and expressed excitement to implement it immediately.
Our consultants documented the new process in both a process map and a standardized work document. The new document was provided to all stakeholders and training conducted to ensure everyone involved in the global expansion process knew their roles and responsibilities. An added benefit of the project was a considerable decrease in the amount of time it took from when the organization identified the need for a new site and when the site could be opened for business.