Challenge:

Illumina has appeared on several “Fastest-Growing Company” lists over the last several years, including Forbes and Fortune. Illumina’s mission is to drive down the cost of sequencing genes, with a relentless focus on product innovation. Their success in accomplishing this continues to open up new markets for the company and its 2,100+ global employees.

As Illumina looked to surpass the billion-dollar revenue mark in 2011, they needed to review the infrastructure required to support this rapid growth. Illumina identified several business processes where tasks were accomplished manually. In order to scale the organization efficiently, they needed to automate these.

One of the business processes that required automation was sales quoting. Illumina sells complex products with myriad options and configurations to meet the needs of each customer. Their specific business challenges included:

• The potential for lost revenue as too much time is spent putting together manual quotes
• The potential for lost revenue and customer satisfaction issues as Illumina might over or under charge for their products
• A quoting process that required too much human intervention, would require adding people and cost as it scaled, and could be more economically automated

Solution:

Illumina engaged Pierce Washington to Project Manage its BigMachines implementation. Pierce Washington was responsible for ensuring the project stayed on schedule, and worked closely with the BigMachines Professional Services team to ensure the requirements were implemented correctly. As with any client engagement, we relied on our consistent methodology, experience, and flexibility to ensure success.

Illumina was thrilled with the quality and experience of the Pierce Washington team. Pierce Washington was proactive in working with the BigMachines team as issues arose. Ultimately, Pierce Washington helped deliver a BigMachines implementation that was on time and on budget.

As a result, Illumina has engaged Pierce Washington for the next phase of the project. In addition to further enhancement to BigMachines, the long-term vision is to automate the entire lead-to-cash process, extending the automation of turning an order into cash once a deal is closed. Pierce Washington helped to enable that vision.