Transforming Program Management: Building a Connected Ecosystem

Contractors and aerospace companies provide products, services and technologies to help government agencies achieve their mission goals. However, outdated legacy systems often cause data silos and limit visibility into revenue, cost, delivery and potential risks associated with a program or a business unit, making it hard to evaluate program performance and make informed decisions.

Beyond technology obstacles, program managers today must manage revenue, costs and margin requirements associated with contracts, scheduling, delivering services or products. Additionally, they have to manage risks, service level agreements, and many other duties to successfully execute a program for a client. Today, many program managers are not provided with the digital tools to evaluate their performance against contract schedules, evaluate risks, and provide foresight into program financial performance.

The overall outcome is an inherently inefficient ecosystem that makes the job of these program managers even harder.

But there’s a way forward: Companies like Salesforce provide technologies that can transform the program ecosystem for businesses. By simplifying program management processes, enhancing collaboration, improving visibility and reducing risks, program leaders can focus on more important tasks, said Mike Mulcahy, strategy and business development executive for global public sector aerospace and government system integrators at Salesforce.

As one of the world’s largest technology companies, Salesforce is leading the way in digital transformation and cloud computing, helping businesses of all sizes connect with their customers and streamline their operations. It has over 200,000 customers globally and has long partnered with government contractors and aerospace companies to help them streamline business processes, improve customer engagement and gain a competitive edge in the market.

Although the company is best known for its software and applications for managing customer relationships, its capabilities extend well beyond those particular products.

“Salesforce is a trusted platform and we are known for our CRM, but we have capability across the entire enterprise and can add value across the entire business cycle,” as Raj Shankar, VP of Digital Transformation & GTM, points out.

Take Salesforce Customer 360 for Public Sector, for example. It refers to the integration of all Salesforce products and services into a single, unified platform that helps public services manage relationships, cases, collaboration, integration, analytics, outreach and application development.

“We can use all elements of our Salesforce 360 suite of products and work with government contractors to put in place a much more efficient way to manage all aspects of their contracted programs, which creates value towards their business objectives,” Mulcahy explains.

Salesforce is a trusted platform and we are known for our CRM, but we have capability across the entire enterprise and can add value across the entire business cycle.”

- Raj Shankar, VP of Digital Transformation & GTM

Those elements include Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Community Cloud and more. By bringing these solutions together into a single platform, businesses can manage their customer interactions and data more seamlessly, gaining insights into customer behavior and preferences that inform their marketing and sales strategies.

Overall, Salesforce 360 empowers businesses to build better relationships with their customers, simplify their operations and drive growth.

“A good ecosystem is one where you mitigate some of what I call the non-value add tasks” Mulcahy says. ”One example is when a program manager has to participate in program management reviews for each of their contracts. They review the margins internally, which is very time consuming to prepare for. In the meantime, they still have to manage the contract, so digitizing that process takes that burden off them, which allows them to add value to the client and organization.”

When it comes to the challenge of disparate systems, Salesforce can help by sharing program data more efficiently through tools like Slack. Integration software like MuleSoft can extract data from ERP, HR, legacy, finance and other systems to allow businesses to bring data together on a single system of record. This integration of data helps businesses streamline their operations and improve efficiency by then utilizing data visualization tools such as Tableau and Salesforce platforms to digitally automate a variety of processes.

The end result is what Salesforce calls program excellence -- increased contract margins by driving efficiencies through digitization and improving customer and client experience, Mulcahy says.

“Having an organization that can collaboratively share, learn and grow from the knowledge it creates over time is valuable, this knowledge is your internal goodwill,” he says. “And a lot of times when people rotate or move out, that knowledge is kind of lost. It needs to be retained for that organization.”

Program excellence also focuses on ensuring programs run as efficiently as possible and driving focus to key business objectives. The outcome is improved margins and improved contract performance assessment reviews or customer satisfaction.

By performing well on contracts, organizations can build stronger relationships with clients and increase their probability of winning future contracts with an agency, leading to better longterm outcomes for the organization and the client alike.

The end result is what Salesforce calls program excellence -- increased potential contract margins by driving efficiencies through digitization and improving customer and client experience”