How IT Consulting Firm BNB Has Gained Insights and Increased Profitability

IT consulting company Business Network Builders (BNB), founded in 2003, is a leading technology services organization that, true to its name, has experienced strong growth and now has operating subsidiaries in Argentina, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK.

However, as BNB moved into new geographies, company leaders soon saw that disconnected finance and HR systems were making it increasingly difficult to monitor business performance and engage with its growing workforce. Additionally, the growing demand for BNB’s solutions affected its ability to deliver a rewarding customer experience and change at the speed clients demanded.

We talked to Javier Delgado, managing partner and chief operating officer at BNB, about the firm’s challenges, its decision to deploy Workday (which BNB also deploys as part of its services offering as a Workday partner), and how the technology has helped the business.

Before going live on Workday in March 2017, we had myriad in-house and external systems. We switched from an on-premise solution to a cloud solution to fuel our growth and digital transformation. We deployed Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), and Workday Professional Services Automation (PSA).

From an HR perspective, Workday has helped us develop our continuous performance strategy for the organization, which is a focal point for us—better review processes, better feedback, check-ins with managers, incorporation of the skills cloud feature, and so on. And we continue to implement more features as they become available. Adoption is also good with our CEO and our executive team; they use Workday reports to drill down and get actionable analytics. Based on that data, they can ask better, more relevant questions to the people managing each aspect of a project.

Within BNB, we’re continuing to see more and more people using Workday; adoption has been positive since the beginning, and the rates continue to grow.

Today, we have more than 100 active customers, nearly 2,000 existing projects and opportunity projects in Workday PSA, and more than 250 reports and dashboards, many of which we shared with our customers.

We’ve seen a number of benefits. From a financial standpoint, we’ve increased profitability on client-facing billable projects, and our revenue process is more streamlined. We have better controls on our project financials and a better picture of total employee cost.

We’ve also enhanced employee engagement and satisfaction. Workers now take an active role in project staffing and forecasting, and we’ve improved performance processes based on the pulse survey, which provides us with continuous employee feedback to help us understand sentiment at any given time.

Gaining a single system for finance and HR has been a big benefit which, in turn, has helped us accelerate informed decision-making and improved our ability to adapt to change.

Workday is unique in how everything works together. By using a single technology platform, we’ve been able to consolidate the business processes of different regions. Before Workday, our business operated differently in every country; only about 30 percent of our processes were aligned. Forecasting, for example, was the same everywhere, but tasks like billing and timesheet entry were totally different from country to country.

Now we have a single model in each country. We still have specific requirements in different countries—for tax reporting, for example—but 95 percent of our processes are aligned globally.

Workday PSA helps us find the gaps between what we need and what we don’t have in our resources. It’s also helping us on the development side by identifying these gaps. One statistic we’re finding useful is the time it takes to fulfill or staff a request for resources. Depending on the skills required, we’ve identified which skills take longer to get staffed.

We now have better insights for connecting resource requests to requirements. We can link the information for how long it takes to staff a resource and have better insights into planning for that.

Two critical areas are project billing and portfolio control. We’ve seen significant improvement in billing efficiency. In the past, we often waited several days before sending an invoice to a customer. Now we have an automated process for invoice generation, and our time to invoice has been reduced.

In the area of project portfolio control, we can control our margins, but almost in real time. We can see which areas are more profitable and which we should invest in. It’s increased our billing efficiency.

My first recommendation is to talk to Workday customers. There’s a lot of collaboration and idea sharing among customers via Workday Community and the annual Workday Rising conference. It’s not just the solution; it’s the community you get from Workday.

The evolution of Workday is also a plus. Applications like Workday PSA and Workday Recruiting, for example, are getting major enhancements. This is great news for us as a customer. Every release includes new features, so we’re not buying a product—we’re buying a solution that’s evolving with us.