AD Package Builder

BUILD AD PACKAGES FASTER

One of the most profitable sales experiments of 2019 is the AD Package. Historically, Hudl subscriptions are sold on a team-by-team basis, where each team can select the products and subscriptions that work best for them. An AD Package allows schools to purchase bundled subscriptions for all of their teams at a reasonable discount, promoting operational efficiency for the high school. For the next fiscal year, Hudl projected to sell 2,000 to 2,500 new AD packages. Currently, manually building AD Packages in Hudl’s billing systems can take up to 2 hours. Because these package requests arrive to the billing team in a queue, a sales rep can wait up to 45 hours to have the package built by the billing team and receive an invoice to send to the customer to bill them.

If Hudl left things in their current state, it would take 3,000-5,000 hours for the billing team to build these bundles. More alarming: sales reps and customers will wait up to 110,000 hours spent waiting for a package to be built. If we could build an AD Package in 30 minutes, we'll cut the amount of time the billing team spends building AD Packages to 1,000 - 1,250 hours. But even more importantly, we could cut the average wait to build an AD Package from 45 hours down to 15 hours. Sales reps could focus on the next major deal in their territory. Customers could gain access to their new products within a day. Customers would be able to pay us a day faster.

IN THE DETAILS

By watching a member of the billing team build a package, I was able to document their current process and tools used in manually building subscription bundles. I watched the billing rep constantly switch between programs, create a list to check and double check correct information, and copy/paste information - occasionally into the wrong fields. I mapped the process in Figma and calculated what portion of the process took the most time, since this could be an obvious area for automation and efficiency improvement.

Seeing this diagram helped propel this project to become the next major project that one of my development teams worked on. In order to wrap our minds around the project, we ran through some exercises from Google Venture’s Design Sprint in order to come to a common understanding of scope for the project.

OUTCOMES

After prototyping, testing, and building for a quarter, we were able to release the AD Package Builder as a tool for our billing team and reduced the time it took to build bundles from 2 hours to 30 minutes. There are some enhancements that we plan to make in the upcoming quarters, including integrating hardware orders into the bundle billing process. We continue to monitor progress and make sure that the tool works as intended and that packages don’t take more than 30 minutes to make on average.