Capturing the “Lead 2 Cash” Journey

Improving the “Lead 2 Cash” journey starts by capturing the “Warts & all” process, so how do we go about this? There are a number of approaches that can be taken, any of which can be useful and often depending on the availability of people, their locations, their attitudes to improvement and the availability of funding to start.

Typical approaches (Which will be described in more detail in future articles) are as follows:

• Brown paper mapping
• Process workshops
• DILO (Day in the Life Of)
• Forward or Reverse audit trails
• Documentation reviews

Having selected which approach(es) to use, the process is captured and documented using an appropriate mapping tool (Useful tools include the ARIS Toolset, CaseWise, iGrafx, Visio and Triaster’s Process Navigator). Note, the tool should be one which makes it easy to maintain the captured process. This author would not recommend using Powerpoint to capture processes, due to the difficulty in making changes to diagrams as more and more complexity is added).

No two businesses are the same when it comes down to defining their “Lead 2 Cash” journey. If we define “Lead 2 Cash” as a High Level process, then at some point we will need to break it down into smaller processes (Often called Sub-Processes). There is likely to be a selection of some or all of the following Sub-Processes involved in many companies (NB: This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, simply to give an idea of the complexity of the overall journey):

• Marketing Planning
• Lead Generation
• Responses to Invitations To Tender (ITT’s) (May also be Responses to Requests For Proposals (RFP’s))
• Bid Management
• Order Management/Processing (Including Order Acknowledgement/Contract Review)
• Procurement (Could be materials, stock, 3rd party services etc)
• Stock Management
• Product/Service/Solution Design
• Product/Service/Solution Provisioning (Could be a complex manufacturing activity, packaging of a solution from existing components, provision of a service or simply taking from stock)
• Despatch
• Invoicing
• Credit Control
• Payments Processing
• Management Reporting

Initially it is a good idea to avoid too much detail and focus on getting an agreed high level view of the journey, with an agreed diagram (sometimes called a Value Added Chain), which shows the inter-connectivity between each of the processes. Often it is not clear where one process should be differentiated from another, but it is essential to do so, because at some point there will be a need to establish who is the “Owner” of a part (Sub-Process) of the “Lead 2 Cash” journey. An Owner may be an individual or could be a group of people with a common interest in that process. In the next article I will look at some of the things that need to be considered for the overall “Lead 2 Cash” process and its Sub-Processes.

Martin Mellor

www.ukba.co.uk