Proliferated Contract Clean Up-- Cisco Hackathon

Inspiration

My work at Cisco is dependent on processes failing and solutions that need optimizing. Service contracts are created in the thousands daily here at Cisco; there are more contracts being created than terminated adding to the database. Partners are constantly complaining that they have too many contracts to manage and being a data analyst myself analyzing the growing number of contracts is taking a toll many of my analysis processes. We call this contract proliferation! Briefly looking at the data many of the contracts have the potential to be merged. Cisco contracts have certain attributes that needs to be matched in order to be merged successfully. By identifying those attributes our team was able to come up with a solution that will slow this problem from growing burdening many of the everyday processes.

What it does

The solution to the problem was to come up with a three step process to clean up the existing data, stop the problem from continuing and then put in validations in the system to restrict this behavior. In the current system, the default when creating a new contract is to choose a "New Contract". With our solution in place, the system will look at the existing contracts and based on the business rules defined, it will choose an existing contract. This will mitigate the problem from happening for all newly created contracts.