Celerant Consulting Builds Custom Apps on Force.com to Drive Business Efficiencies

Celerant Consulting is the largest independent global operational consulting firm, with more than 20 years experience. Its focus is to improve the operational efficiency of its customers--work aimed at delivering measurable results of actual savings for its clients. Ian Clarkson, the founder and CEO of Celerant, sums up its mission by saying: "In the future, the only real source of value from consulting will be delivered, bottom-line results."

For Celerant, that future is now, as its project revenues depend, in part, on producing tangible savings. Celerant has delivered more than $10 billion dollars in value for more than 750 projects in 98 countries--with more than $1 billion in annualized savings for its clients in the last year alone.

Naturally, an organization whose entire focus is efficiency would look to a platform that delivers the same flexibility and economy it promises to its customers. Celerant has been using the Force.com platform to implement internal tracking systems specifically for this reason.

The Beginning

Celerant discovered Force.com the same way many customers have, through the introduction of the Salesforce CRM solution. Celerant was able to handle the implementation and customization of the Salesforce CRM application itself, which produced immediate benefits in terms of adoption and usability.

"This choice allowed our business experts to shape the system to meet their needs," explains Stuart Mills, European channel manager for Celerant. "There was no need to use an external technical expert who did not understand our business domain to implement the system."

Celerant brought in Salesforce CRM in 2006, and, when Howard Lamb became CTO in 2007, he saw that the advantages of using the Force.com platform for more than just CRM. Lamb saw that Celerant had an opportunity to bring the savings and flexibility of the platform to other application systems within the organization.

Software as a Service Versus Hosted Infrastructure

Celerant Consulting was not moving from an in-house system to the Force.com platform – it had already been using a hosted infrastructure provider for a couple of years.

Gareth Davies, in his role as Enterprise Manager, is in charge of all of Celerant’s applications and of insuring that the systems are properly aligned with the needs of the business. Davies saw immediate benefits in using the Force.com platform instead of simply outsourcing infrastructure.

"With outsourcing, we simply removed the physical infrastructure and its management from our premises. We still had to deal with using that infrastructure to meet the needs of our business," explains Davies.

Davies further states "With Force.com, we get an enormous amount of business functionality as part of the platform. Instead of building processes from scratch, we can simply configure the capabilities of Force.com. In the end, Force.com provides us with business plumbing--not just infrastructure plumbing."

Davies points out that the benefits of cloud computing extend beyond the development of applications. Celerant was looking at purchasing an application from three major vendors. "With the AppExchange, we were able to evaluate all three vendors in less than a month. We selected one and signed a one year contract. At the end of a year, we discovered that another vendor could offer more value for the money, so we simply switched over to them." Davies pointed out that this process would have been impossible on any other type of platform.

Force.com Steps Up

Lamb saw Force.com as a key component to his IT strategy. His work with Force.com began in early 2007, when his staff downloaded and tested prototypes for a recruiting application and a time-off manager from the AppExchange marketplace. The IT team went on to customize and extend these applications before putting them into production.

The first project the staff began from scratch was an application to manage contracts. Celerant's contracts can be quite complex, for a number of reasons. First of all, the new contract system was going to have to replace seven different contract management systems in seven different countries, while satisfying all of the internal customers of these systems. Secondly, Celerant contracts are very customized since, in some cases, a percentage of Celerant's payments come in response to the company achieving certain operational milestones.

Once the contract system was in place, Lamb's next job was to implement a project tracking system to monitor the process of all projects. This system was integrated with the contract system so key financial events such as billing and related project milestones would work in synchronization. Since both of these systems were built on Force.com, integration of the two applications came with the platform.

Gareth Davies is in charge of implementing systems at Celerant. He and his team had built the previous project tracking system, which was primarily a data entry system, in four months. With Force.com though, Davies was able to build the new system in less than a week.

Davies was even able to add some high level functionality that allowed system users to immediately understand the worldwide scope of their projects, as well as whether the projects were suffering from any issues.

"There were things that just came with Force.com, such as translation, that we couldn't even conceive of doing if we had to do it ourselves," says Davies.

The Effects of Force.com

One of the core features of Celerant's business model is how it approaches a potential client. Unlike many consultancies, Celerant is not a time and materials business. Instead, Celerant performs an analysis for the client that also lays out a project designed to create savings by improving operational efficiency. The company's fees are based, in part, on how great these savings are.

Payment for projects revolves around milestones designated in the client contract. Understanding how Celerant is progressing towards these milestones is crucial to maximizing revenue.

Prior to implementing those integrated systems on Force.com, tracking project status was time consuming. Each time Celerant wanted to see a summary of how it was progressing on a project, different departments had to go to different systems to pull information and then manually enter everything in a spreadsheet. With their Force.com applications, project status towards every milestone is now instantly available.

The power and productivity of Force.com has even changed the way that Celerant views its own business, as illustrated with the application map shown above. The applications running on Force.com also allow Stuart Mills to circulate internal announcements every time Celerant lands a new project, keeping the entire company informed and energized.

The Future for Force.com

Celerant has found that Force.com is not only less expensive than its previously hosted infrastructure, but that development costs and deployment times are significantly reduced.

Given this initial success, Celerant is looking at increasing its use of Force.com for a wider range of applications. In the next year, Celerant is aiming to implement a tracking system for its analysis projects, which should reveal key performance indicators such as how long it takes to bring in a project after analysis is complete, and to understand what factors increase the likelihood of an analysis resulting in a project.

Celerant has already moved several of its key systems to Force.com. The pipeline process is implemented with the standard salesforce.com CRM product. The projects and contracts systems are currently running on Force.com, while the Costing Model and PCG modules are currently separate systems. Celerant hopes to bring these two systems onto Force.com as well.

Celerant is also actively investigating third-party offerings on the AppExchange marketplace to replace existing systems for human resources and financial tracking. “Having the option to purchase applications to run on Force.com gives us the ability to make our own buy-versus-build decision without giving up the advantages of an on-demand environment,” says Lamb.

Celerant is also excited about the new features being introduced on Force.com, including Force.com pages, which it is actively investigating as an option for future development.

The Bottom Line for Business

The entire focus of Celerant Consulting is to help its clients improve their operational efficiency. The benefits of improved efficiency derive primarily from making the human component of a business better able to perform their job. Celerant has years of experience with this basic truth – the hardest thing to change is staff culture, yet the most important gains can be made when staff productivity is increased.

IT systems should never stand in the way of this challenging task. Using the Force.com platform, Lamb has found that he and his staff can create applications that give more time for this crucial component of business improvement. “Ninety percent of system development time is focused on design, configuration and installation,” explains Lamb. “With Force.com, those components are greatly reduced, or disappear altogether.”

Lamb also says that Force.com has had an impact on both how the IT staff operates and, even more importantly, how IT is perceived by senior management. "Using Force.com, IT is now able to deliver applications faster than the business can consume them,” he says. “Our focus has shifted from application provision to helping the business achieve real results for our customers."

Mills further explains by adding, “Celerant looks at people, processes, and systems to improve business efficiency. Force.com greatly reduces the need to spend resources for systems and streamlines the creation and implementation of processes. We can spend our time on people, where our efforts are most highly leveraged.”

And the IT staff at Celerant is now seen as a contributor to the overall success of the business. “Since Celerant adopted Force.com, senior management’s view of IT has shifted: IT is no longer a group that just adds cost and time, but has become a valuable team member that adds ideas and value,” Lamb says.

To sum it all up, Lamb says “It’s such a no-brainer from the CIO perspective. With Force.com, you can dramatically change economic models and reduce solution delivery speed.”

Celerant has proven how Force.com can make a positive change for their business – a big change.

Celerant Consulting