Companies in the consultancy and services sector are often derided as `body shops’, even though most of the bodies in question help businesses overcome thorny business or technical issues they could not resolve themselves. But there is a downside to running such body shops – and that is managing the activities of the bodies themselves.
This is where the implementation speed of SaaS is having an impact, as was pointed out at a NetSuite seminar held in London, yesterday. According to CEO, Zach Nelson, the service sector is now one of the biggest markets for NetSuite, with the company having been in the Services Resource Planning (SRP) business since 1998.
SRP is a specialised adaptation of the widely used ERP approach, where the primary resource that needs to be managed is the people – the consultants, analysts and domain specialists which are the primary source of revenue for the business. Mapping their skill sets onto client requirements can be a difficult task, especially if, like Lloyds Register, there are some 9,000 of them spread all over the world.
Speaking at the seminar, Stephen Hand, Group IT Director for Lloyds Register, said that the speed and flexibility of the implementation process had been an important factor in the decision to move to a SaaS approach. “This allowed us to take the `vanilla’ NetSuite system and get all our staff onto it so that they could build the resource management system they needed. We asked them what they wanted from it and built it in,” he said.
At the other end of the spectrum Nick Oulton, CEO of a small, Liverpool-based presentations design company, showed how he was using NetSuite to manage constant staff reallocation as new work came in. “When new work comes in I have to be able to not only move a particular specialist from the work they are doing to the new job, but also make sure that someone is then allocated to complete the other task,” he said. “In practice, our resource allocation book is being re-written three or four times a day.”
Nelson said that cases like this show that many of the myths put about around SaaS and the cloud generally are untrue. “People say that complex processes won’t run on the cloud, but in fact it can run even more complex processes than traditional applications. They say that customisation is the Achilles heel of the cloud but it is in fact more malleable and customisable, and services are easy to migrate and change as the business changes. If we couldn’t do that we would have been out of business 10 years ago,” he said. “These cases show that businesses are living, breathing things that change as markets change. Traditional solutions usually require long periods of development followed by an even longer maintain mode, where `maintain’ means don’t touch it or change it for 20 years.”
How this can be avoided as an approach was shown by Saideep Raj, head of Accenture’s Global SaaS Practice. “The cloud allows companies to adapt normal implementation methods to fit their own needs,” he said. “The standard approach is have a lengthy period of Business Process Re-engineering followed by taking the project live and running in maintain mode. But we now have clients that build new projects using just a short period of basic BPR followed by taking the project live and developing it as it is being used.”
Not only can this result in a faster and more effective implementation, he suggested, but also a more flexible one. In effect, the implementation can be in a permanent state of `development’ where it is adapted to changing business and market circumstances as they occur.
NetSuite’s primary offering for the SRP market is OpenAir, which has now been upgraded to incorporate functionality from the company’s OneWorld offering. These include multi-language capabilities in the form of Spanish, German and French being added, together with multi-tax and multi-currency operations. Together these extend OpenAir’s usability in managing globally-based operations that are common amongst the larger services and consultancy businesses.
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