Case Study: Assessment Study
How one company partnered with Fluent to embrace a new strategy and way of doing business.
Client Snapshot:
During its over 100 years of being in business, this proud midsize shoe manufacturer and distributor has been both an industry leader and casualty of globalization.
Leadership knew that for them to remain relevant would require embracing a new strategy and way of doing business.
Challenge:
As the result of significant industry disruption, the company had been experiencing declining sales and profits for many years.
This ultimately forced the board to make a difficult decision, either reinvent the business by pursuing a new strategy or go out of business. They chose to pursue a new strategy which they knew would require upgraded technology to be successful. They also knew they would need outside expertise to make the right decisions to this end.
Solution:
Assessment of people, processes, and technology.
The board hired a new COO to lead the transformation. One of his first decisions was to hire Fluent Consultants to conduct an IT assessment with the goal of determining what technology investments would be necessary to achieve the company’s new direction and goals. We conducted a rapid assessment of the client’s current technology assets to determine:
- Usability of the current platforms
- Ability to scale
- Decision support reporting
- Employee appetite for change
Final Outcome:
Immediate measurable results.
Thoroughly reviewing the company’s order-to-cash processes, it was determined that upgrading the current core operating system would be prohibitively costly and even if possible, due to negative employee sentiment regarding its extraordinarily poor performance, would pose a threat to retaining key employees. Thus, our recommendation was to select a new ERP system. The client agreed with our rationale and requested that we conduct the system selection process. Given that the key requirements had already been documented, the review of the 10 candidate ERP systems was accomplished relatively quickly.
Our deliverables for this engagement included the following:
Current State IT Environment
Order-to-Cash processes
Desired Future State IT Environment and Gap Analysis
Executive Summary, initial findings, recommendation, and rationale
ERP system selection requirements and candidate review matrix