In part 3 of our series on the Calero Centers of Excellence, we take a closer look at 2 CoE’s and the impacts they have made to customers recently.
Any company can do a Lean project, but that’s finite. Our Centers of Excellence are evergreen. We’re playing the infinite game here—constantly tweaking our applications and best practices and learning. With our Implementation CoE, we’re asking, “How do we shift left? How do we help our customers realize value sooner?”
In the same way, our Customer Value CoE team is an internal advocate for our customers. They’re always asking, “How does this drive value for the customer? Or, if we make this change, what impact will it have on our customers?”
These centers often work together and create unique solutions that defy our customers’ expectations. For instance, this year we had a new customer, and we knew contracting would take a while to complete. However, the entire time the customer was saying, “We want to get started on this.” And we were saying, “We want that too.” When the Customer Value CoE and Implementation CoE teams came together, we asked, “How can we start sooner?” We ultimately decided to start and allocate resources before we even signed the contract, so we could deliver within the customer’s timeline and set up our implementation teams up for success. We didn’t want them to have to face a tsunami of work—implementation in a short period of time—because of the contracting process.
That’s how committed we are to our customers’ success. Sometimes, that’s risky, but commitment often requires risk. Our Implementation team is always asking, “How can we go live sooner? How can we give customers access to a world-class application and team as soon as possible?”
Through live collaboration across all six of our strategic business units, we’re constantly iterating and challenging ourselves. Every time we meet, we’re tweaking best practices until they’re better.
If we were to ask two customers “what does success mean”, we will get two different answers based on their unique estates, needs and integrations. Within the requirements gathering phase of an implementation, we ask customers specific questions to ensure our operational and technical teams have a strong understanding of their needs (process, technology, data, integrations, etc.) and success criteria.
We strive to deliver our customers a predictable and similar experience across our six global business units. As a result, concluding an implementation, our project managers complete project retrospectives documenting all learnings and best practices. The project retrospectives are shared with our Project Management Offices allowing us to develop best practices and or work back with product management and engineering to enhance our technologies.
The commonality across all our Centers of Excellence is this: our customers remain first, no matter what decision we’re making and no matter where we’re making it.