Ineum Consulting

Continued

Ineum selected PeopleSoft by the end of 2005. The company began the project on January 2, 2006, and in a scant five months had completed the implementation and, more important to Tirlemont, had accomplished its transformation. Making the switch while the company was still relatively small was an advantage, says Tirlemont. “With ERP software, what’s usually critical is how you migrate,” he explains. “Can you go ‘big bang,’ or do you need to go by location, by country, by business unit? We were small enough to be able to do a big bang.”

The Benefit of an Aggressive Time Frame

One of the key benefits of Ineum’s own experience is what it learned about how companies manage process transformation—knowledge it can now apply to future client engagements. The most significant lesson, says Tirlemont, is that a tight time frame is a benefit rather than a drawback—an insight he believes applies almost universally. “Time is not the opposite of quality,” he says. “Most companies don’t know how to transform their organizations, and they use IT as a transformation enabler. If you don’t transform quickly enough, it’s as if you were trying to shoot a moving target. Business is moving faster and faster, and if IT isn’t moving at least as fast as the business, you end up with a solution that doesn’t match your business needs anymore. Our role is to ‘time-box’ it and make sure that it goes fast enough so that the business doesn’t change too much between the time you specify the system and the time you roll out.”

Making the solution match the business needs was a bigger challenge for Ineum than for most. As Tirlemont explains, because its information systems had been hosted by Deloitte, the company had scant knowledge of those systems. Ineum employees had to learn them quickly and describe internal processes before they could even select a solution. Most companies already have that documentation in place— defining, for example, the steps they take from receipt of a customer order until they deliver it, invoice it, and receive payment. Or defining what they do from the time they receive the résumé of a potential job candidate until that person is hired, promoted, and eventually leaves the company or retires.

Ineum’s advantage is that Tirlemont has a team of 100 consultants who do this kind of process analysis every day. Even so, says Tirlemont, without the right governance it probably would not have happened so quickly.

“The challenge is that there is usually not just one way of doing things,” he says. “You need to have the right governance within the company to say, ‘We are doing it three ways today; this is the one way we want to do it tomorrow and beyond.’ It requires a leap of faith that you are choosing a decision-maker who will be accountable to the sponsor and responsive to the users. Of course, you’ll always be blamed if you make the wrong decision, but that’s the risk the company takes. If you want to go fast, that’s the way it works. It’s difficult, especially in a consulting firm where all the partners believe they are equal and that they have a say in every decision.”