Efficiency under pressure: T-Mobile’s document automation journey
The complete revenue lifecycle includes many facets, from traditional sales to renewals and retention, cost savings, and sometimes even divesting assets. This last example might not be intuitive, but divestiture can be an important part of revenue generation—as Conga customer Alyssa Schirmer, Senior Project Manager at T-Mobile, shared in a recent presentation.
When telecommunication giants T-Mobile and Sprint merged, the federal government required a significant divestiture of assets to preserve competition. As you might imagine, this was a complex, years-long undertaking with very specific requirements. We were pleased to have Alyssa join us to share her insights on the company’s journey and the role Conga solutions played in its success.
With help from Conga, T-Mobile was able to automate document generation for its due diligence processes—and achieve some remarkable outcomes along the way:
- 400% increase in productivity
- More than 35,000 documents generated
- 15 minutes saved per document (a full year of time savings!)
- 100% adoption of Conga solutions
Before we unpack those results, let’s learn a bit more about the circumstances that led T-Mobile to seek out a document automation solution.
Background and challenges
Details of the Sprint/T-Mobile merger are too complicated to cover in this blog post, but a high-level explanation of one key element is critical. As a condition of approving the transaction, the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required the newly formed company to divest or option certain assets.
This complex endeavor included countless sub-projects, each with its own timelines and dependencies. Moreover, every part of the divestiture project required new business processes, integration of data from multiple sources, sophisticated permissioning, and lock-step communication between team members.
Alyssa’s team at T-Mobile was primarily responsible for setting up salesforce to manage the complex internal and vendor due diligence portion of the divestiture project. They relied on Salesforce to manage due diligence, but quickly recognized that additional automation was needed to ensure a successful result. Fortunately, they found a trusted partner in Conga.
Demystifying Due Diligence with Conga
Due Diligence was a critical phase in the divestiture process, encompassing things like quality control, management of supporting documents, site surveys, and meeting compliance standards. However, the data required to complete these due diligence tasks was spread among many disparate sources and file types, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and SharePoint documents.
In order to complete their due diligence work efficiently—and hit critical deadlines throughout the process—the team at T-Mobile needed a way to automate their checklists, notifications, and reporting. Their chosen solution would also need to integrate seamlessly with both proprietary internal tools and external databases. T-Mobile selected Conga Composer to automate document generation processes for their due diligence tasks—and they added Conga Grid to help manage their complex data sets.
Conga Grid: Managing data in one place
Initially, T-Mobile’s due diligence processes required users to manually track down information from various spreadsheets and other sources. To improve efficiency, they needed to get users out of Excel and give them a single place to access and manage the necessary data—functionality that was not available natively in Salesforce.
Following some initial training and enablement, Conga Grid gave T-Mobile a user-friendly way to:
- Collect information from multiple sources
- View it in a single, customized grid
- Automatically create related records and parent/child objects
- Efficiently complete individual or bulk updates
Conga Composer: Creating accurate, professional documents
Tedious, manual document creation was another pain point in T-Mobile’s due diligence work. Their process involved manually collecting data from multiple Word and Excel documents to create complex checklists—depleting resources and leaving significant room for error.
Implementing Conga Composer allowed T-Mobile to automate document generation by automatically extracting relevant data into custom branded templates, converting them to the preferred file type, and storing the final documents in Salesforce. Composer also allows for easy sharing of documents between teams, as well as complete tracking history within Salesforce.
This automated process allowed T-Mobile to generate 35,000 documents with dramatically improved efficiency—saving a full 15 minutes for every document created. And because the documents were guaranteed to match Salesforce every time, they saw a significant boost in accuracy.
Conga service makes all the difference
While implementing any new software comes with growing pains, Alyssa had high praise for the experience of working with Conga. Her team had not previously used Conga solutions, so they appreciated Conga’s expert customer support and comprehensive product documentation. When issues arose, the Conga team resolved them quickly and efficiently. And with help from the Conga implementation team, T-Mobile achieved 100% adoption of their new Conga solutions—exceeding all expectations.
As the T-Mobile journey illustrates, the right solutions can streamline the revenue lifecycle, simplify even the most overwhelming projects, and eliminate complexity in almost any scenario.
Ready to learn how solutions like Conga Composer and Conga Grid can deliver value for your organization? Get a demo today!