How do you keep it all your CDRL organized? How do you manage the curveballs being thrown your way? There are on the fly requests, timelines that need updates, communication of the changes and reports to be created because of the requirements. We feel the stress level rising, but keeping it centralized, transparent, and automated will help you not only gain back valuable time but also have real-time visibility into the status of contract deliverables.
Unison held a survey for program and data professionals highlighting the top five challenges around deliverable management. These challenges directly resulted in increased costs and schedule delays for the organization.
- While there were many challenges, the first on our list is that there is still no visibility. We don’t know what is on contract, what is due when, and what has been delivered already. Maddening!
- Too high lead time for data managers to process incoming deliveries, typically due to the high level of manual processing and data inputs that were required by them.
- No visibility into government suspense state to respond to the vendor submissions or where the deliverable was at in the review process.
- No visibility into vendor performance to support contract performance assessment reporting. So, things such as on-time performance, late performance, and quality deliverables were not captured.
- Inability to locate previously submitted delivery files, which costs the organization to re-acquire that data, which increases the cost to the organization.
These challenges are a direct result of not having a common process and common method or solution to process and manage deliverable data and a high level of manual processing and data input.
Reviewing our survey results and learning some key take-a-ways include:
- On average, it took Data Managers about 15 to 17 minutes to process each deliverable. When you have, on average, 30 deliverables a day, this can equal to about 37 hours of time over the course of a week just processing that deliverable to get it into the review cycle.
- They were also experiencing, at any given time, over 250 opened deliverables were in processing at different stages, and they were unable to identify what stage the deliverable was in or at times even locate the deliverables.
- 90% of the responses back to the vendor were delinquent, and 30% of those delinquent responses were greater than 180 days.
These concerns, coupled with other challenges, resulted in the loss of time and that eventually increased costs. After implementing the standard best practices process and an automated centralized solution, the organization completed their Lean Six Sigma study, and the results were quite impressive.
- They saw an 80% decrease in the amount of time it took to process incoming deliverables.
- What took Data Managers 15 to 17 minutes per deliverable to process, they were now looking at 1 to 2 minutes per deliverable processing time.
- They were able to significantly decrease the rate of delinquent responses back to the vendor by 85%. They also were able to reduce the overall volume of deliverables that were open, during any given time, by 85%. through these best practices and automated solution.
- All the above improvements resulted in a cost avoidance of over $600K
Unison Program Management gives data managers a reliable and efficient way of managing CDRLs to minimize risks and costs