Category Archives: Case Study

The Blueprint for Growth: Structuring a Startup for Global Success

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The Blueprint for Growth

Structuring a Startup for Global Success

An early stage MNC startup with presence in three continents, an implementation and support services provider for a leading ERP product.

The company had expertise in providing ERP implementation and customisation services to global manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and financial sector companies for over five years across different geographies. A very customer centric company in their approach with ambitious Management team.

The company had started off providing independent consulting services to customers and had gradually grown organically to build the operations across Americas, Europe and India.

Problem statement

The company had grown organically through incremental ramp-up and growth of accounts based on the services being provided to specific customers. Thus, the growth was on need basis in isolated areas than with proper planning and strategy behind the growth or regional focus.

The company was heavily focused on senior leadership and customer facing teams in US and very young teams grown organically sitting out of India and European offices. Naturally, the delivery and quality processes had a maturity imbalance due to the lack of strategy, design and well-integrated organization structure. Customer prioritization and criticality drove delivery commitments. This impacted the planning and quality effort behind the delivery operations. Thus focus on quality was not identified as the driving factor behind delivery commitments.

This led to higher amounts of re-work, frustration for the customers leading to lack of trust and deteriorating relationships.

Rest of the World offices lacked local leadership. Remote management became difficult and it was ineffective to groom the remote teams. This led to obvious communication gaps between teams and also with the customers.

Absence of structured processes overall made the operations adhoc and ineffective with a lot of efforts spent in rework and wasted resource commitments.

Since fire fighting was the order of the day, focus on documentation was compromised to keep up to the timeline commitments.

Based on the earlier work delivered and cost leverage being provided to the customers, the company was able to secure new business but delivering with quality and on time was a challenge. This in turn led to stressful engagements with the customers and internally with the employees across the different geographies.

Planning, structured process flows, organization structures, accountability definitions were missing elements hurting the growth plans of the organization.

Approach & Solutions

Company structuring.

As a first step the company needed a proper definition and structure. Proper roles and responsibilities definition and assigning accountability to each role was accomplished. This was based on working principles of RACI model. Detailed who does what and where does the buck stop for each process and deliverable was identified across different levels and different teams across the organisation. Standardised templates to document, communicate, track and monitor these were maintained. This brought in a lot of transparency and ability to identify who held the reins to commitments to the customer.

HR was advised on building proper career path, salary bands mapped to each band and role and overall transparency on appraisals process was achieved to boost the internal confidence of all employees. It was important to remove the influence of personal influences on evaluations of individual contributions to the Organisation. This led to enhanced positive feeling and uplifting zeal of employees leading to higher productivity. Performance was guaranteed to be rewarded.

Next focus was on streamlining delivery processes to ensure there is enough rigour in documenting what’s obvious and not obvious to bring in traceability. An unwritten rule was institutionalized. “If it’s not written, it was never said…”

This brought a lot of clarity between the teams on their commitments, accountability and traceability. This directly reflected on the quality of engagements with the customers and internal teams alike.

As a part of the documentation focus, standardizing documents was next focus and deliverable. Coding standards, documentation standards, naming conventions, approval standardisation was set across the organisation. This led to less people dependence on knowledge and understanding and moved all knowledge to standardized documents.

Standardized documentation, coding and naming conventions and mandatory documentation between the project teams and the customers were identified and agreed upon. This brought in the cultural change on the process of engagements with the customers.

Proper hiring mix was planned and budgeted for offices other than in the US. This helped get experienced lateral hires who could help accelerate the growth & maturity of Organisation.

Detailed training plans were developed with HR and training department to increase the skills of the employees across the board. Every employee underwent predetermined training hours every year leading to their planned development cycles and growth. Overall the organisation was getting ready to move up in the value chains with the customers and market their services on better quality and prices. This was done across the globe to enhance the skills levels across the Organisation.

One team and common goals for organisation and teams!

Structured frameworks were used to align all members of specific customer project teams to chase common goals and deliverables. Individual responsibilities and accountabilities were defined and assigned. This left nothing to imagination and gave structure and ownership to the teams.

Organizational goals were defined and cascaded using the People strategists’ principles and models to individuals at the ground level.

Challenges faced :

  • Bridging gaps and building cohesive culture.
  • Mentoring Leadership and People.
  • Alignment on Company’s new focus areas.

Frameworks used :

  • Strategic Engagement Model
  • People Strategists Model – Vision to Objectives
  • Accountability Framework – RACI
  • R&R definition
  • Oracle AIM
  • Interview assessment framework

From Staffing to Solutions: Building an ERP Center of Excellence

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From Staffing to Solutions

Building an ERP Center of Excellence

A mid-sized MNC company with presence in Americas and India was a renowned player in staffing services. The company was a focused leader in providing skilled man-power with skills across various technology platform. Their forte’ was to work with the customer’s short term and long-term staffing needs and provide requisite staffing consultants at short notice.

The company had realised these staffing solutions market place had become very competitive arena and they were unable to generate revenues and margins like the erstwhile days. It was imperative to look for other avenues in Technology sector for newer business opportunities that could help them meet their revenue and growth targets.

Problem statement

The Company was focused in the field of staffing solutions for their customers. They carried a pre-determined thin bench of basic skilled and low-cost resources for easy deployment. As the markets turned matured with large scale enterprise solutions being implemented; the customer demands shifted from regular low-end developers to high-end technology specialists. People with relevant industry experience and skills in implementing large enterprise applications were needed. These resources were less readily available in the marketplace for temporary & immediate staffing demands.

As an alternate service offering & change of business strategy; it was decided to setup a COE with  project delivery capabilities on the ERP technology platform. This would elevate the level of engagement of the company with their existing and newer clients from T&M staffing to complete project implementation ownership.

The company lacked market presence in project engagements, delivery processes, GTM strategies and the skills to deliver ERP solutions. They lacked marketing readiness, skills to respond to RFPs or well-trained sales team. The company lacked proper organization and delivery structures for setting up this COE. HR lacked skills &  necessary expertise to hire relevant staff, knowledge about their salary bands, designation matrices and career maps for these highly skilled and talented staff.

Approach & Solutions

It was agreed to help the company build a technology practice (COE with delivery capabilities) around one of the leading global ERP platforms. The decision necessitated a paradigm shift in the company’s beliefs, expectations and primary areas of expertise into building a COE of ERP grounds up. This choice was different from staffing business run historically.

A detailed approach based on AMREG methodology fundamentals was utilised in helping analyse the requirements and the objectives that the management expected to meet. The expectations were effectively mapped out using standardised templates. Realistically expectations were aligned to match the appetite of the company for this new service offering in a do-able time span. Key performance measurement parameters of the organization were also realigned.

Detailed discussions with the management teams, leadership teams and the people on the ground helped understand the company’s readiness and appetite while on-boarding this journey. Presentations were made to Management team to set realistic expectations on process to follow and outcomes. It needed multiple discussions and presentations to the Management team to remap the new business performance parameters with financial objectives. Basics like difference in revenue recognition and realisation timelines had to be integrated back into the company objectives and financials as monitored by the Board.

With management on-board, a detailed Annual Operating Plan (AOP) was drafted and set into motion for implementation. Detailed revenue plans, region-wise Go-To-Market and sales projections were built. Sales training kits were developed. Sales targets were set. Teams were hired and groomed on the newly defined  Quality processes. Detailed delivery processes were designed and documented.

The HR team was guided with detailed descriptions of specific skills to be hired and  modalities to hire them. Based on the HR frameworks to hire the best talent from the market was shared with the HR and recruitment teams. Detailed interviewing techniques including question banks for detailed evaluation of consultants were shared with the interviewers and managerial staff to make selection a quality oriented efficient process.

With this entire basic infrastructure built grounds up; a revenue pipeline of a couple of million dollars was built over a period of 18 months.

Challenges faced :

  • Bridging gaps in culture and building cohesion across the organization.
  • Mentoring Leadership and People to align with Company’s new focus area.

Frameworks used :

  • Fundamentals of AMREG Framework.
  • Principle of Strategic Engagement Model.
  • People Strategists Model – Vision to Action (Objectives)
  • Interview assessment framework.

Driving Strategic Diversification: Building New Technology Competencies for a Global SAP Leader

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Driving Strategic Diversification

Building New Technology Competencies for a Global SAP Leader

A mid-sized MNC company with presence in two continents, a leader in the segment, with expertise in SAP implementation services wanted to diversify their service offerings. The Company is a leader and has expertise providing services to global manufacturing MNCs over two decades across different geographies on SAP platform. They have built robust solutions, tailor made to the customer’s needs & with India localizations. A very customer centric company in their approach.

Looking at a long-term view of their services, shift in market dynamics with AI at centre-stage & their passion to grow; the Company reviewed their business strategy. As a part of their growth strategy aligned with their core business, they wanted to setup a new division focused on providing services on Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM), ServiceNow and Microsoft Power platform.

Problem statement

The company approached OptiOrg Consulting Pvt Ltd to evaluate viability of setting up three different Competency centers and launch these services into the market. OptiOrg is specialised in Strategic consulting & Advisory services for setting up GCCs & Technology units. OptiOrg used their proprietary AMREG methodology to engage with the company and understand their short term and long-term objectives. Considering the Company’s vision, key business drivers and market situations; OptiOrg helped the company set up the Center of Excellence for three technologies with three different approaches suitable for the Company.

Approach & Solutions

Company was focused on embedding AI automations into their solution portfolio. Post discussions with the Company and detailed analysis of the platforms in the market; OptiOrg  suggested & jointly zeroed-in on Microsoft Power platform as an overall strategy for the Company. A detailed plan to engage, hire, train and develop resources and solutions required for the regular repetitive processes of the customers was built & implemented.

In discussions with the customers, regular repetitive processes were identified and automations developed as ready off-the-shelf solutions.  Based on extensive market research, a road-map of potential solutions integrated with SAP was developed. The Company added them into their roadmaps for customers over next 12 months. Additionally, a detailed strategy was formulated for data management, preparation and use into building Power apps for the existing flows, processes and data available with the customer.

For building this COE, OptiOrg suggested the Company, a bottoms up approach. Solutions were designed on Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. Insightful Senior management decision making dashboards, governance dashboards and automation flows on Financial & support processes were the early candidates of automation. This immensely helped support functions like Payables, Receivables, HR & risk management function with automations with minimal manual interventions.

This has helped the customers of the Company immensely in cost savings and using AI automation for enhancing their business efficiency, getting visibility into management dashboards for quicker decision making and cutting-edge AI driven risk management.

Company was also  led by OptiOrg into building high potential Conversational AI solutions for employee interactions and Customer facing support processes.

Since this is a new competency being built, OptiOrg worked with the Company to identify internal and external resources and groom them on the technology and build the skills. A proprietary HR framework built by OptiOrg was put to use in hiring and on-boarding appropriate skills from the market and blend them into the organization. While doing so, the Strategic Customer engagement model was also deployed by OptiOrg to provide a 13-point guided step by step framework in making engagements with Strategic customers a dependable, professional and well governed seamless process.

OptiOrg used their proprietary AMREG framework to further analyse the business needs, potential opportunities with the customers of the Company and work out a different approach of setting up the RIM practice for the Company. The services were built as different individual independent offerings to the customers based on their requirements. Independent service’s mini-COEs were built with an overall approach and plan to blend all mini-COEs into a full-fledged process driven RIM COE over a period of 12 months.

The approach was split into getting started with the deployment of SMEs for specific services on server management and network management in a 24*7 support modality. The processes were built in agreement with the Customer SLAs and standardized to make a playbook around the two service offerings.

Additionally, OptiOrg helped the Company build the remaining processes around End user device management, Cloud Infrastructure management, Application management , Back-up and Disaster recovery and 24*7 Monitoring and Support. Automations using Power platform were also designed to function with this COE to make the processes more efficient & scalable for the Customers without having to linearly increase the headcount with their growth.

OptiOrg, as experienced People Strategists setup people processes for the company to tie up the Company objectives into personal KRI and KPIs of individuals. A detailed mapping of Organization objectives, split into translatable, actionable items that are benchmarked and measured for individuals across the organization were set up.  This enables tracking every individual’s contributions to themselves, their teams and the organization at large.

This process gives a robust infrastructure to the HR team in setting objectives and making annual appraisal process transparent and dependable that can help every person to see how they are being benchmarked and evaluated. This in turn removes the painful feeling of “decisions and evaluations are made in black box” that employees always carry post appraisals. This is a huge win for the Company and in turn for OptiOrg!

 OptiOrg has contributed immensely in the fourth and most critical offering of setting up ServiceNow competency. The Company & one of it’s customers had an urgency to get engaged on providing ServiceNow support. Ideally OptiOrg would approach with the AMREG consulting framework to the setup this entity too. However, due to the customer’s urgency, OptiOrg cut out an engagement with basic engagement processes around providing technology services through few SMEs starting off on T&M model of engagement.

While the services hit the road running, OptiOrg has put together a complete road map to build the ServiceNow practice. The Practice is being setup using the proprietary AMREG framework including that of Strategic Engagement model, building optimal organization structures catering to the global needs and a matrix organization structure clubbed with the SAP services division.

During this setup, different people frameworks were used to interview the skills based on a dependable process of hiring, interview and benchmarking hierarchy. Detailed RACI mapping across the organization was established in this closely knit new COE embedded into the organization’s fabric and culture. The practice is setup as competitive to step into the market and compete with the best of the service providers on ServiceNow platform.

Challenges faced :

  • Bridging gaps and building culture & cohesion.
  • Mentoring Leadership and People and alignment on Company’s new focus areas.

Frameworks used :

  • AMREG Framework
  • Strategic Engagement Model
  • People Strategists Model – Vision to Objectives
  • Accountability Framework – RACI
  • Interview assessment framework