"What are our people doing?"

Delaware Consulting International is a leading IT player, with 24 locations spread across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and America. Of the 1,400 employees, 800 are active in Belgium. When the company was looking for a suitable solution for resource planning, traditional ERP systems failed to meet expectations. On the other hand, a demonstration from ionBIZ convinced Delaware to work with the Mechelen-based software company ionProjects. 

The expertise of Delaware Consulting is found in three domains: Customer Experience, Business Insight and Operational Excellence. The company is the most important integrator of SAP in Belgium, but is also a valued partner of Microsoft for projects including Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM solutions.

Delaware was established when the IT department at Bekaert became completely independent in order to provide other companies with services. At first, the fledgling company came under the wings of Arthur Andersen and Deloitte. A management buyout in 2003 was the starting point for impressive growth.

Under the credo ‘Combining Strengths, Delivering Solutions’, Delaware has performed with a cast-iron vision and values.

Steven Fleurent, CIO at Delaware Consulting International: ‘Team spirit, entrepreneurship, respect and commitment: for us, those aren’t just beautiful words on paper. Our values are experienced by our employees day in, day out.’

The international growth of Delaware is partly due to the intensive collaborations with local partners, resulting in a strong anchoring in the local economy.

Evolution to best-of-breed

Today in the IT world, Steven Fleurent sees a clear evolution to cloud and best-of-breed software applications. Companies no longer automatically choose one single monolithic company system, more often choosing the best solution in every domain.

‘We also apply the best-of-breed principle when it relates to computerising our own organisation. When we were searching for an application for resource planning, we couldn’t find what we were looking for in traditional ERP system. The planning module in SAP appeared too general to offer an answer to Delaware’s specific needs. When we attended a demonstration from ionBIZ, it immediately appeared that this was the solution we were looking for to run our resource planning.’

What are our people doing?

‘We expect that a resource-planning tool will tell us exactly what our people are doing today, and what projects they will be working on tomorrow and in the following weeks.’

In contrast to other planning tools, ionBIZ delivers reliable forecasts, both in the long term and the short term, as well as on every level of detail desired.

‘Thanks to ionBIZ, we can predict the availability of our staff members in the following month with an error margin of just one to two per cent. We can immediately determine where the challenges lay and take the necessary measures,’ explains Steven Fleurent.

Keep overhead costs low

Delaware Consulting continuously strives to keep overhead costs as low as possible. At the same time, management needs more direction as the number of employees grows.

The implementation of a software application may therefore not result in an even heavier organisation but must allow ‘lean’ working.

Steven Fleurent: ‘If an employee who is working on a project wants to take a day off, they can directly request this from their project leader online via ionBIZ. The project leader can immediately approve the request without someone else having to be involved. Such online processes allow us to keep working quickly and flexibly.’

In the same struggle for optimal employability of employees, Delaware happily makes use of the Competence Matrix in ionBIZ, making life much easier for planners.

Reducing pressure

Steven Fleurent greatly appreciates the standard reporting possibilities in ionBIZ. The fact that ‘actuals’, for each team or project, can be compared with the ‘budget’ means you quickly see when targets, such as the workloads of employees, are not being met. ‘You immediately have a view of the planning and you can reduce the pressure on the team before it’s too late,’ explains Steven Fleurent.

Future

Delaware saw future possibilities with ionBIZ and is now examining how, for example, the application might be integrated with Outlook. The introduction of a mobile interface is on the programme for the future.