Case Study: CME Smart Green Program
The Challenge
With the Ontario Government’s support, Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters (CME) launched a new $25 million SMART Green fund to assist small and medium-sized manufacturers to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) and improve energy efficiency. The SMART Green program had a $25,000,000 funding envelope that needed to be granted through a competitive process to hundreds of sponsored projects over a relatively short period of time. In addition, there was a limited number of staff available for this new service so, a strategy to leverage technology in order to expedite the processing of project proposals, was high on the list.
The SMART Green organization was experiencing a high workload and cost constraints and could not increase staff to address the additional workload. They needed to find a more efficient automated process that would consolidate the information collected to produce effective performance reporting without adding more work to the process.
The Solution
The SMART Program engaged Eperformance to provide an automated solution to support the full cycle of the SMART program funding cycle. Specifically: Eperformance applied a standardized business framework for CRM automation to accelerate the requirements process; implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a foundation case management tool for the grant program delivery process; and Extended the CRM foundation tool with grant automation add-on to provide a full eservices front-end for applicant submissions, and to accelerate the configuration of CRM for grants management. This project included the full life cycle of implementation including project planning requirements analysis, testing and deployment in to full operation.
The Result
The SMART Green staff were impressed with the result. They were able to launch the program online, and on time. As the submission intake began, the team of users were pleased with the ease of use of the solution to assign, review, approve, and monitor applications. The system allows them to efficiently track and report on funding agreements as they advance through the various phases of the application process.
