I need to standardize my project management workflow across similar recently acquired businesses. 

Experiential Marketing Agency

The Challenge

A lower-middle market private equity firm is looking to consolidate operations across four recently acquired agencies that all engage in project-type work that requires project management and project accounting. Each business manages these functions differently, and the goal is to develop a workflow management framework and consolidate operations and finance where applicable. An added complexity is the smallest and newest acquisition has the best process at first glance.

 

 

The Solution

NetSuite OpenAir was selected over Workamajig immediately after our engagement in this project. Our first goal was to revamp and standardize the workflow management across the business units so that we were not automating a flawed process. We held multiple sessions to reach a consensus to take to the OpenAir implementation team. The high-level workflow is below:

 

Tools Utilized

  1. Site visits
  2. NetSuite OpenAir
  3. Lucidchart
  4. Excel modeling
  5. API development & integration
  6. Cultural persuasion

Results

We successfully migrated the four separate business operations into OpenAir. To get the final management signoff, we needed to create salary bands for US  and Canadian staff, develop generic job costs for estimating new projects, assign the appropriate hierarchy for project expense categories, create a new chart of accounts for accounting and do an extensive customer data cleanup to eliminate duplicates.