2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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Stantec Inc.

Marketing Knowledge Centre

Founded in 1954, Stantec Inc., a public company, provides professional design and consulting services in planning, engineering, architecture, surveying and project management. Its multidisciplinary practice areas serve public- and private-sector clients in a diverse range of markets.

Challenge

In 1998, Stantec established a vision for its growth plan: to be a top 10 global design firm by 2008, attaining annual revenue approaching $1 billion and employing 10,000 people.

To meet this goal, the company would have to transform some of its more traditional, manual business methods. For example, its 40 offices across North America and the Caribbean need solid information for every competitive presentation, submission and proposal, yet in 1998 no common body of knowledge existed for reference or access.

Standard company information resided in various versions on servers and desktops across the organization. Without a single source of truth, the potential existed for staff to submit proposals with inconsistent information and branding elements. These less-effective proposals could easily translate into a loss of business. Equally worrisome was the question of which project opportunities to pursue. Such decisions affect risk management, profitability and resource deployment, yet the company relied principally on the perceptions of individuals.

Occasionally, efforts were unnecessarily repeated when more than one office solicited a project of a similar nature without sharing information. Worse yet were the simultaneous pursuits, in which two or more offices unknowingly went after the same opportunity. Responding to project opportunity pursuits took three to five business days after a decision to pursue an opportunity was made - which in its own right could take days to weeks, depending on the availability of appropriate stakeholders. It was clear that if the company truly expected to meet its growth targets, it would need to create an automated single source of truth for marketing support and business development. The Stantec Marketing Knowledge Centre (SMKC) was at its inception.

Objectives

To succeed, this resource would need to:

• Enhance employee productivity by reducing time associated with search;
• Improve employee confidence resulting from improved information-sharing, access and capability;
• Provide immediate, virtual access to marketing resources from all locations across the company;
• Standardize and streamline both the go/no-go assessment and the proposal preparation process;
• Achieve time savings, and increase revenue generation, related to redeployment of staff;
• Attain a user satisfaction rating of more than 75 per cent, with specific emphasis on usability;
• Strengthen the company's brand equity through consistent presentation of its corporate materials.

At the project's outset, marketing knowledge and materials were gathered from every office and a physical library of images, profiles and company intelligence was manually converted. The conversion was iterative, with true automation tools first beginning to take hold between March and July 2005.

As information was uploaded into the system, it became immediately available to staff through the company intranet. Stantec's Marketing Knowledge Centre is a secure internal online resource, and not accessible by the public.

Solution

The SMKC, developed using Microsoft technologies, is a robust, three-tiered environment that centralizes all data used for marketing and business development activities across the company. This system optimizes server storage space and network traffic by centrally storing one version of information. Productivity has significantly improved.

"Employees have reported a dramatic decrease in the time required to put together project and personnel profiles, and the numbers speak for themselves," explains Lara Masse, director of marketing.

"The reduced amount of time required to produce these profiles saves Stantec approximately $1.2 million a year. With a single source of truth for all profiles, employees no longer have to spend large amounts of time searching for or re-creating documents."

Informed decisions that consider the input of all key stakeholders can be made almost immediately with the use of the Go/No Go Assessment Form, and staff are generally able to prepare a project proposal within the next 48 hours. The Go/No Go Assessment Form permits business developers to assess, through a series of standard questions, whether a project opportunity should be pursued.

The company has digitized 20,000 images, more than 5,000 project profiles and personnel profiles for more than 4,000 employees

"The information now included in our proposals is current, accurate and relevant to the opportunity," Masse says. "In addition, it is far more strategic, with our focus shifting away from information gathering and toward meeting the business needs of our valued clients."

Innovative Use of Technology

An automatic PDF generator creates PDF documents that present company credentials in a consistent branded format every time.

Image thumbnail-generation technology requires only a single high-resolution version of each photograph to be uploaded, dramatically reducing the time needed to scan and upload different image sizes.

A single update to the SMKC publishes that information to www.Stantec.com - saving time and reducing the margin of error.

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems, Stantec Inc. has been awarded a 2005 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Organizational Transformation, For Profit category.

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