Market Expansion, New Product or Service Offering
Emerging Markets Expansion Strategy and Planning Lead
Client: Greater Boston Biotech Firm
Engagement: 6 Months
Assignment: Lead a cross-functional Commercial, Supply Chain, and Finance team to map out country-specific requirements and approval timelines to operate, market, and sell products in Australia, New Zealand, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina.
Deliverable: Define business strategy needed to operationalize and execute the commercial launch. Develop a detailed cross-functional launch project plan of all milestones and dependencies for each country. Detailed list of financial, legal, and regulatory requirements per country to operate, launch, and support business operations.
Outcome: A single launch plan for Emerging Markets that could be leveraged across the organization detailing the decisions, key activities, and timelines for each country. Well-understood benefits and risks matrix of opportunities and threats that may occur over the next 3 years given the long lead times to establish business operations and receive regulatory approvals in each country.
Merger and Acquisition Capability
Client: Greater Boston-Based Medical Device Firm
Engagement: 6 months
Assignment: Build a virtual Merger and Acquisition Capability within the Information Systems (IS) department of a global medical device company complete with tools and templates to support various initiatives.
Deliverable: Developed an IS Merger, Acquisition, and Divestiture Playbook to support the diligence, negotiation, planning, and execution phases of a new business initiative. This Playbook included guidelines for each project phase, process flows for supply chain and financial flow data; project planning and financial modeling tools; RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) models to define the generic roles and responsibilities that needed to be assigned for each project; and project monitoring and status reporting templates that could be leveraged across all M&A deals.
Outcome: Developed a comprehensive M&A Playbook used on 12 completed deals in its first year. During this year, benchmarks were set that covered financial projections, resource demands, and project timelines leveraged for all subsequent deals to increase accuracy in integration/separation planning. Since the IS M&A team members fluctuated in response to corporate demands, the tools served as an excellent guideline of best practices to respond effectively to fluctuating demands and served as a model for other business functions across the company to follow.
Sales Mobility Capability
Client: Minnesota-Based Medical Firm
Engagement: 9 months
Assignment: Build a Sales Mobility Capability devoted to supporting a global sales and marketing organization that manages governance, devices, and applications (6,000 iPads with 20+ custom apps).
Deliverable: Conducted extensive research across stakeholder groups to understand the current and expected future demand for mobile devices in the sales cycle. Established a relationship with Apple to understand the technology strengths and weaknesses for where iPads could have the greatest impact within a medical sales setting. Identified three strategic partners who could fill the knowledge and resourcing gaps that existed at the organization.
Outcome: Established the Mobility Excellence Center (MEC) within the Information Systems department to define the application development process and standards, software quality review process, application deployment, and user support model. Assembled a Mobility Governance Board (cross-functional leadership team) to oversee decision-making process, ensure user adoption, and secure funding for the MEC initiatives. Defined roles and responsibilities for all MEC positions and developed training plans for all team members to address knowledge gaps. Launched a mobile device management (MDM) platform and converted existing users to the platform.
Global Collaboration Service Offering
Client: Minnesota-Based Medical Firm
Engagement: 6 months
Assignment: Define a corporate collaboration strategy that increases collaboration across the organization and (1) positively impacts the sales cycle and (2) accelerates product development time to market. Strategy must include current state assessment, future state at 5 years, and a project assessment for executive review.
Deliverable: Performed a current-state assessment of business processes associated with the sales cycle and research and development to understand information flow and challenges faced with collaboration across team members. Conducted industry research to understand collaboration platforms and projections for product development. Led a benchmarking study of organization’s competitors’ use of collaboration tools. Partnered with steering committee members to evaluate various collaboration tools to assign potential user adoption rates across the business processes. With this information in hand, proposed a future state defining business needs that would benefit by global collaboration tools. Prepared a shortlist of technology platforms to meet the business needs. Developed a multiyear milestone plan with a budget for each phase. Created a business valuation model to compare how the benefits could be monetized compared to costs.
Outcome: Presented a completed project assessment for executive review which included an overview of the current state, proposed vision of ideal future state, and a phased rollout plan for each of the three major milestones, along with estimated budget, resource needs, and timeline.