What clients say after working with us

Challenge

The company had grown through three acquisitions in four years. Each acquired business brought its own set of tools, and by the time the engagement started, the organisation was running fourteen separate systems with limited integration. Leadership wanted to consolidate but had no agreed picture of what the target state should look like or what sequence of steps would be reasonable.

Approach

We interviewed fourteen staff members across four business units, mapped the current systems landscape, and traced the major data flows between them. The analysis identified three clusters of systems where consolidation was viable in the short term and two areas where consolidation would require more foundational work first. The roadmap was structured in three phases over eighteen months.

Outcome

Leadership adopted the roadmap as the basis for their annual planning cycle. Phase one was under way within six weeks of the engagement closing. The annotated systems diagram was still in active use eight months later.

"We had talked about this for two years. Having an outside view that was grounded in what the teams actually told them made a difference to how seriously leadership took the recommendations." — COO

Challenge

The eight-person finance team was spending an estimated twelve to fifteen hours per week on manual reconciliation tasks between their ERP, a separate expense tool, a shared spreadsheet, and their banking platform. Staff found the workload demoralising and the team had high turnover. The finance director wanted an outside view of whether the tools or the workflow — or both — were the issue.

Approach

We spent two days embedded with the team, sitting alongside staff during their normal working processes. We traced where data entered each system, where it had to be re-entered manually, and where the reconciliation steps were being performed. The review identified four specific handoff points that were causing most of the manual work and noted two of them could be addressed without any new software.

Outcome

The team addressed the two process-level improvements within three weeks of the report. The comparison brief supported a decision to consolidate the expense tool with the ERP. Estimated reduction in manual reconciliation time was around eight hours per week after three months.

"I thought the problem was the software. Turned out it was partly the software and partly how we had set up the process. The review separated those two things clearly." — Finance Director

Challenge

The sales team had outgrown their current contact management setup. Three CRM vendors had already presented and the shortlist was informal — based mainly on which demonstrations had been most polished. The managing director was not confident the demos reflected how the system would work in practice for a team that handled a mix of walk-in and telephone sales, with a significant portion of deals requiring follow-up over weeks.

Approach

We drafted a requirements document that described the actual sales process in detail, including the follow-up workflows. We designed three scenario-based demo scripts and facilitated demos with each vendor using those scripts. The weighted comparison matrix scored each vendor against the requirements. Two vendors were closer than the initial shortlist had suggested; one was eliminated early on a practical grounds related to Thai-language support for the team.

Outcome

The company selected a platform that had not been their initial frontrunner. The managing director noted the requirements document was as useful as the comparison matrix, because it forced an internal alignment that had been missing from the original selection process.

"We had been going in circles for two months. Having someone who was not invested in any of the vendors design the evaluation process made the decision much cleaner." — Managing Director