Streamlined Construction Vendor Management

Bird streamlined vendor management with D3Clarity, cutting costs, enhancing data quality, and enabling scalable growth in under 5 months.

CASE STUDY

4-MINUTE READ

The Challenge at Hand

Bird provides a comprehensive range of construction services from new construction for industrial, infrastructure, and building markets to industrial maintenance, repair and operations services, heavy civil construction, and mine support services, as well as vertical infrastructure, including electrical, mechanical, and specialty trades.

M&A activities have made Bird a leader in fully integrated service offerings for the complete lifecycle. M&A activities present both challenges and opportunities, incorporating a technology footprint that includes many applications with similar functions and an expanded overall cost for the business. This led Bird to embark on a digital transformation program aimed at transforming Bird’s business process, technology, and people dimensions to achieve a modern, standardized, and scalable “One Bird” operating model.

Consolidating their vendor data and automating the supplier data management process was Bird's top data management priority to address. Management of any one vendor is difficult with factors such as recently used, quality of service, location, tax data, financial data, diverse supplier certifications, and environmental governance. Management of 1000s of vendors is beyond difficult, especially when there are duplicate data repositories, disparate processes, and inconsistency of data owners.

Innovative Solutions Unleashed

After a meticulous evaluation, Bird selected Semarchy xDM as the MDM platform based on the software capabilities' POC results, business feedback, and overall performance score. The next phase was to select the right implementation vendor. D3Clarity was chosen as the implementation vendor of choice, recognizing our expertise in Semarchy and our ability to align with Bird’s project approach and deliver comprehensive managed services.

Utilizing D3Clarity’s MDM-as-a-Service offering, a centralized, cloud-first infrastructure strategy was created to reduce Bird’s infrastructure costs and enhance the scalability and automation of enterprise data management.

D3Clarity collaborated with Bird’s business and IT teams to design and deploy a production Vendor Master solution in under five months.

The team applied an agile approach to develop data models that supported each master object. Bird users now have the ability to see a vendor hierarchy, which wasn’t previously possible but has tremendous value in the realm of data quality and measurements. Authorship was enabled within the MDM solution, which enabled business users to initiate an addition or modification, with complete visibility of requests routed to the appropriate data owners for approval.

The centralized Vendor Master solution streamlines the Vendor creation process, prevents data duplication, enriches the data with corrected addresses and NAICS data, and integrates updates with various downstream systems. Frequent knowledge transfer sessions empowered Bird's MDM team to cultivate proficiency in developing future enterprise MDM solutions and attain self-sufficiency in the ongoing operational maintenance of any new MDM solution.

100% of requests are now going through MDM for Vendors. The Vendor Master solution consolidates Bird's vendor information processes, data, and reporting analytics. This made the financial analyst's job easier in finding the right quality vendor in a timely manner. The financial analysts were involved throughout the implementation and had trust in the data they received.

The deployment on D3Clarity’s hosted cloud infrastructure ensures an architecture foundation that is secure, scalable, and flexible to support future growth and migration of other business units/data domains.
The cost savings realized by utilizing D3Clarity’s MDM-as-a-Service allowed Bird to focus resources on business productivity rather than maintaining infrastructure and application support.
The ultimate goal was to reduce 153 dispersed applications down to 20 majority integrated applications with enhanced security protection, new data insight capabilities, and reduced IT complexity. The Vendor Master solution is the first of the new fit-for-purpose applications.

Transformative Results Achieved

Bird needed to transition from a highly fragmented vendor process into a standard enterprise vendor business model that would scale in technology, processes, and people. Their choice in Semarchy and D3Clarity has led them well on their path to fulfilling their One Bird initiative.