Challenge
Before ScopeStack, it took the presales engineers at IMS at least two hours to complete an average-sized project. Some projects took as long as a day.
“It was a lot of Word documents and a lot of Excel spreadsheets,” said Anthony Schaefer, service owner at IMS.
All the time that IMS engineers were spending on documentation was leading to missed opportunities because it was taking longer to get proposals out the door and, as Anthony said, in the RFP process, “the early bird gets the worm.”
The IMS team wanted to find a way to increase efficiency to gain an edge over the competition.
Solution
No one on the IMS team was aware of a solution, but they have offices in Greenville, SC, which is the location of ScopeStack’s headquarters.
The IMS team saw ScopeStack as an effective way to standardize their service definitions, maintain all service language in one place, and simplify document generation. They decided to use the platform in their presales and solution design process.
Results
ScopeStack is now an integral part of the presales process at IMS.
“Every single service that we offer that’s tied to a product SKU, from end-user support to service management, we create the language in ScopeStack,” Anthony said. “So when we want to propose a service, we just select that on the platform, and from there, you have the full scope of work.”
This has led to increased efficiency, which has enabled the company to win more projects. IMS engineers now spend ten to fifteen minutes scoping services for smaller projects and no more than an hour for larger ones.
“It’s increased profitability because our time to present proposals has greatly decreased,” Anthony said. “Now, we’re able to be the first to get something in front of the customer, which allows us to be more flexible in the RFP process.”
Then, when an engineer meets with a potential customer, they use the statement of work from the tool as the agenda for the meeting. They can show the client each feature that’s included with the proposed services.
Anthony said, “I would recommend ScopeStack to anyone who’s looking to create a set of easily repeatable standards or standard language.”