A medium-sized production subcontractor with around 300 employees that had been very well established for decades was unable to process the requests from existing and new customers in a timely manner for weeks. The situation was exacerbated by the resignation of an employee in the new customer management department.
The interim manager was hired as an experienced consultant for acquisition and new projects. He was given the task of optimizing new customer management (purchasing, sales and project management). The client attached particular importance to the interim manager not only making recommendations, but also demonstrating the optimized process himself with promptly prepared offers.
Technical and commercial contact for customers and suppliers
The interim manager analysed the acquisition process "on the job": he temporarily acted as the technical and commercial contact for customers and suppliers. He screened and prioritized the existing inquiries and determined reliable and competitive prices for all purchased parts. At the same time, the interim manager coordinated the specialist departments (project managers), answered their questions and prepared the quotations together with the sales manager (dual control principle).
On awarding the contract, the interim manager managed all departments on a purely technical basis, coordinated the suppliers (launch management) and took care of data maintenance in the ERP system.
Quotation process accelerated - orders generated
With an unbiased view from the outside, the interim manager was able to quickly identify time wasters in the quotation process and eliminate them by changing workflows. The existing IT structure was used more efficiently, daily project team meetings were introduced and start-up costs were reduced. As a result, unprocessed inquiries were turned into offers much more quickly. Several of these offers resulted in many small and one very large order.
Employees trained in new customer management
Based on this experience, the management decided to hire not just one, but two new employees for new customer management. The interim manager trained one of these employees during his project assignment.
