Case Study: IT Strategy and Application Selection

A leading manufacturing and distribution company with over $400 million in annual revenue had experienced strong business performance over the years due to seasoned leadership, corporate planning and management processes, and a great culture and team. The company set clear goals and priorities to become a world-class organization. Their growth objectives called for a more efficient “people platform” through which to hire new employees and integrate acquired workforces into the company.

Key Challenges

• The company’s existing HR systems environment were disparate, disintegrated and outdated.
• Numerous applications handled individual functions, requiring redundant data entry and significant manual effort to maintain and operate on a daily basis.
• Job-specific knowledge was not easily transferred from previous employees to new or transitioning employees, causing inefficiencies.
• Although executive leadership knew significant value could be unlocked through enhanced processes and tools, the path to capture this value was unclear. 

Our Solution

Our consulting team’s approach allowed us to leverage leading practices to define an HR technology strategy linked to the company’s business priorities:

1. Process Assessment – We assessed key business processes to identify areas with the greatest potential to drive value in the organization through enhancements to processes and enabling tools.
2. Application Analysis – We evaluated the client’s current business applications and potential future state solutions to identify the required capabilities and the right tools to effectively support the business.
3. Future State Architecture – We defined a future state application architecture that would achieve two things. First, it would support the business as it scales and enable sustainable value creation by consolidating the appropriate functions onto one single platform. Second, the architecture would allow for the strategic integration of existing systems to minimize manual efforts and provide the necessary capabilities to support the specific needs of the business over time.
4. Vendor Selection – We took a structured approach to vendor selection to help the company accelerate what is often an overly long and costly process. Our process included selecting an initial pool of vendors based on their ability to meet the company’s high-level HR IT strategy, then narrowing that pool to select the vendor who was ultimately the right strategic fit based on a series of focused assessments.

The Results

Partnering with the company’s executive team and HR business sponsor, we were able to develop a clear vision for a future state HR systems environment based on one modern, consolidated Human Capital Management (HCM) platform and guided the organization to a consensus on the new HR application. We identified and met an aggressive timeline, without sacrificing analysis, which allowed us to maximize our leverage during price negotiations with the software vendor. The resulting agreement will save the company more than $100,000 annually, compared to the sum of the legacy application licensing costs, and create significant efficiencies through the elimination of manual processes and enhanced capabilities.