"This project was at a standstill and in great jeopardy of failure until the customer was given vision for the portal through an iRise simulation – and the lights immediately turned on."

– Associate Partner, GSI

Background
This customer is a leading provider of high-speed Internet, data, video and voice services for over 7 million customers. Looking to better control purchasing for its 40,000 employees and improve relations with thousands of suppliers, the customer built a procurement portal to facilitate business processes and provide supplier, employee and executive access to important purchasing information.

Challenge
The customer's business users did not have a clear vision of how to design a procurement portal that would both mitigate risk by streamlining processes and create business opportunity through supplier enablement. Limited resources and an ineffcient business design process diminished requirements definition productivity. The design team relied on ambiguous text-based requirements documents and static screen shots to describe complex systems. These methods were incapable of giving business users any insight to life-like system interactivity and put the entire project in jeopardy of failure.

Result
Working with business analysts from Accenture, the customer simulated the new application in iRise, which provided the vision needed to design a portal that would achieve their business objectives while mitigating the risk of a budget-, resource- and time-constrained project. The interactive simulation helped the customer define and validate their project's vision, improve communication with stakeholders and engage IT early in the development cycle. iRise established for the customer a new process for better understanding business requirements before development.

Simulating the procurement portal prior to development resulted in fewer late-stage change requests and time savings across the board: 33% in definition and scope confirmation, 33% in functional design and documentation, 15% in functional-to-technical team handoff, 15% in system testing and 33% in user acceptance testing.