Customer challenges

• Rapidly growing

• Managing new businesses with disparate systems

• Urgency to act

Our customer needed accurate and timely information in order to properly manage operations - who doesn’t?

In this case, it’s their primary role, as they are management consultants who help both turn-around struggling businesses and improve the performance of others.

As new businesses were taken under management, there wasn’t the time or budget to allow for a change of finance and or operational systems.

The interim solution was to ask all managers to enter data into spreadsheets via dropbox.

The spreadsheet and dropbox solution was very labour intensive and also prone to error. There were also issues with the dropbox synchronization; sometimes changes would be over-written by other users.

Solution

Our solution was to propose the building of an internal (intranet) portal.

The value in the portal would be the ability to integrate historic data from existing systems and present it in a format that would allow users to easily enter forecasts and results. Data validation ensured that ‘crazy numbers’ couldn’t be added accidently.

The data which was entered was then imported into the customer’s BI and reporting tool.

Project challenges

1. Testing - end users weren’t keen to test. They expected everything to work exactly as they imagined.

2. Authentication - unfortunately, the customer didn’t run a secure Active Directory service which we could use to authenticate. Therefore, we needed to have a password management system. Many users would forget their passwords. Also, at many sites (which is all too often, common) shared logins would be used.