On course for growth with decídalo

Swiss SAP consulting company focuses on further growth with decídalo

Innflow AG is one of the leading SAP consulting companies in Switzerland. Due to its dynamic growth, the company had reached the limits of its internal processes and tools for skills and resource management. Therefore the SaaS solution decídalo was introduced in 2018. This not only enables smooth, further growth, but also a more efficient collaboration within Innflow’s partner network.

As an SAP Gold Partner, Innflow specializes in the implementation, optimization and operation of SAP-based IT systems. The company employs over 70 of its own SAP consultants and has an established network of partner companies. Currently, around 120 consultants are working on Innflow projects. The spectrum ranges from short assignments of a few days to large-scale projects over several years.

The Innflow team has many years of consulting experience, high social competence and excellent references. The comprehensive SAP expertise is complemented by expert knowledge in relevant, supplemental technologies.

A convincing proof of the company’s capabilities is an essential part of Innflow’s sales process. Consultant CVs play an important role here. Innflow has high quality requirements for the CVs, which reflect the quality standards of its own consulting services.

Before decídalo was introduced, CVs were maintained in Microsoft Word and stored in a shared directory. With increasing company growth and high utilization, not only did CV maintenance by consultants become ineffective, but project staffing also became less efficient. Updating Word profiles was very time-consuming and prone to error. At the same time, it was no longer possible to have the knowledge and experience of all consultants in mind. In the sales process it became more time-consuming to make statements about available and existing skills and to identify suitable candidates. When the right consultants had been found for a customer inquiry, the CVs were mostly out of date and often had to be revised at short notice.

Company growth required new solutions

In 2018 Innflow decided to reorganize its resource management, i.e. all internal processes around skills and project assignments, and to centralize the responsibility for this. An experienced resource manager was hired for this job. He quickly realized that a professional software solution for skills and resource management was needed and started looking for a suitable supplier. The most urgent tasks were in skill and CV management. In the medium term, capacity and availability planning, utilization management and project staffing were also to be optimized. Therefore, a provider was sought that offered an integrated platform for all skills and resource management processes of a consulting firm.  The consulting industry application decídalo from Data Assessment Solutions (DAS) was quickly identified as the appropriate solution.

Consultant CVs as a sales instrument

First of all, the specific requirements of Innflow were defined in a set of web meetings. The primary goals were to reduce administrative effort, speed up the search for consultants and provide CVs of uniformly high quality. Even before the tool decision was made, Innflow’s marketing team had designed new, appealing CV templates. The objective was in particular to highlight the impressive project experiences of the Innflow consultants. Special attention was therefore paid to the presentation of the project histories. These are underpinned by customer logos and the indication of the project volume in person days.

As part of the implementation project, the CV template specified by Innflow was transcribed to decídalo. After the import of the user master data and the initial filling of the system from existing Word profiles, the application was rolled out to the consultants and team leaders.

Integration of the partner network

At the same time, Innflow started adding partner companies to the system. Virtual organizational units were used to incorporate partners into the org chart. This enables Innflow’s resource management to search uniformly across internal and external consultants. decídalo’s comprehensive authorization concept always guarantees a secure separation of data. Partner companies can maintain the data of their own employees but have no access to the profiles of other companies. The easy integration of partner companies was an important advantage for decídalo in the evaluation process for the new tool. Innflow plans to further expand the use of the platform for more efficient collaboration with external employees.

“We are confident that our partners will also benefit greatly from decídalo and want to give them the opportunity to use the system for their own projects.“, says Roman Caniga, Innflow’s Resource Manager.

Positive feedback throughout

The feedback on the new solution is consistently positive. “We have realized significant time savings, not only for resource management, but also for consultants and team leaders,” Caniga points out. “Finding the right consultants is really easy with decídalo. The generated CVs look professional and have high quality content. The effort for updating our consultant profiles has decreased significantly”.

In addition to the right skills, availability is also decisive for the planning of consultants. Innflow uses decídalo’s Outlook calendar synchronization to obtain a central overview of bookings and free capacities. This feature is particularly popular with team leaders, who can use it to obtain an up-to-date view of the workload of their employees. The employees’ calendars are also in the cloud – in Office 365. This also makes scheduling of external employees easy. Every external employee receives an Office 365 account linked to decídalo.

Innflow praises not only the decídalo software but also the cooperation with Data Assessment Solutions (DAS). “The clear focus of DAS on the consulting industry makes collaboration easy. Our wishes and suggestions are immediately understood, and adaptations can easily be implemented” explains Caniga. Innflow is happy to share its positive experience and actively recommends decídalo to partners and other companies.

Outlook

With calendar synchronization, part of decídalo’s resource management functionality is already in use. The next step will be to roll out the full range of functions for project planning and staffing as well as capacity management. decídalo was introduced to optimize operational processes in consulting. The data collected here is also interesting for HR processes, especially for targeted skill development. Here, too, Innflow sees further potential that can be tapped with decídalo.

About Innflow

Innflow AG is one of the leading SAP consulting companies in Switzerland. It helps its customers to achieve outstanding performance by introducing, optimizing and operating SAP-centric information systems. Innflow is well known for its high-quality projects and long-term successful customer service, both nationally and internationally. The company can claim top references in business informatics and SAP consulting.