Sept. 11, 2000

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Easier People Tracking

Revamped systems let consultants deliver the right skills and services for a job

By Aisha M. Williams

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anaging a warehouse full of bar-coded products is no simple task. But executives of business-and consulting-services firms say that job isn't as tough as what they do--manage and account for knowledge, time, and people. When human beings are the "products" a company markets, things can get pretty complex, says Tommi White, executive VP at Kelly Services Inc.

Kelly Services is a staffing company that each day places about 150,000 temporary and 5,000 full-time employees with customers around the world. Because of the E-commerce boom, Kelly is bolstering its IT infrastructure to streamline its business processes.

"A main concern of business and consulting firms is how to keep track of personnel, personnel skills, and billable hours," says Dan Rasmus, VP at Giga Information Group. For a professional-services firm such as Kelly, customer retention depends on the ability to deliver the right services for the right jobs, he says. That falls under the heading of expertise management--maintaining information on temporary employees and their skills. Professional-services firms such as Kelly use corporate Yellow Pages or Web sites where workers can post their résumés and log their skills, Rasmus says.

"Utilizing solutions that help us match the right person with the right job in the right city at the right time, and negotiating a bill at the same time, is very important to us," says White. Last year, Kelly focused on beefing up its Web site to more efficiently match its clients with temporary help. This year, the company is revamping its back-end infrastructure to compete globally in business-to-business E-commerce through strategic partnerships with Ariba, Commerce One, and Oracle. The company recently implemented products from Oracle to deploy enterprise resource planning solutions.

On the front end, the company is deploying Oracle Financials and the systems associated with human resources and payroll so that all its branch offices throughout the United States can use the same applications under one ERP system. Oracle Financials also was deployed in Australia and the United Kingdom, and Oracle human resources and payroll in the United States and the United Kingdom. In Kelly's small and midsize branch offices in Mexico and Italy, the company deployed Systems Union's SunSystems financial software, a less-expensive product.

"Our front-end office systems help us manage the 150,000 temporary employees we have on assignment daily," White says. "We need to manage them and make sure they've gone to work and that after they've finished working we can match them with someone else."

Certainly, Kelly Services isn't the only business-and consulting-services company implementing specific modules of ERP applications to simplify front-office systems. ABM Industries Inc., Booz-Allen & Hamilton, and Equity Office Properties Trust also use aspects of ERP offerings from various vendors. These companies aren't necessarily interested in complete ERP solutions, which typically streamline inventory management and order processing for manufacturers. Instead, they use human resources, payroll, financials, and other selected ERP modules to suit their unique business-management needs.

Full-blown ERP implementations likely won't be important to business and consulting firms, says Lori Orlov, an analyst at Forrester Research. "I don't believe it's a trend, nor do I think PeopleSoft, Oracle, and J.D. Edwards' ERP solutions are right for these services-oriented businesses, especially since ERP doesn't invoice until products ship," she says. "These companies aren't selling products."

Katherine Jones, managing director at the Aberdeen Group, takes a similar position on the subject. "This isn't a trend, news, or ERP as traditionally defined," she says. "But some of these companies can use specific pieces of ERP software to track financials, HR, and occasionally projects."

Rasmus says business and consulting firms need to track financials, HR, and payroll in pretty much the same manner any other type of company would. "Why shouldn't they use best-of-breed software like Oracle and PeopleSoft?" he says. "If these companies go to second-and third-tier players, the risk is higher in the long-term stability of the product."

Both Equity Office and Booz-Allen listed ERP as high on their lists of IT projects. Equity Office is in the process of implementing ERP software from J.D. Edwards. Previously, the company, which is one of the nation's largest managers and owners of office properties, used a 15-year-old business-management system from Management Reports International. "The J.D. Edwards software is very scalable because it runs on AS/400 machines. It has a great backbone and engine that will act as a backbone for all of our accounting information and Web-enable all of our business processes," says Richard Kincaid, executive VP and CFO at Equity Office. The ERP software will be fully integrated with the company's current and future apps.

Implementing ERP throughout a large company can be grueling. Anywhere you change processes, you have to change management procedures internally. "We had a massive training effort when we started the ERP-implementation process, because it was so different from anything we had ever used before," Kincaid says.

Companies that met their goals for ERP projects spent 17% of their budgets on training, according to a recent study by Gartner Group. ERP user preparation is the hardest training challenge some companies ever will face, yet it is essential for a successful implementation, says Gartner Group research director Clark Aldrich. "Companies that budget less than 13% of their implementation costs for training are three times more likely than companies that spend 17% or more to see their ERP projects run over time and over budget," Aldrich says.

Since its deployment in the first quarter of 1999, the ERP software has let Equity Office eliminate 186,000 staff-hours by increasing productivity throughout the company.

Booz-Allen is strengthening its Web models for knowledge management through ERP implementations. Utilizing IT to compete effectively in business-to-business marketplaces has been important to Kelly Services, but Booz-Allen, as a business-and consulting-services firm, isn't investing in such ventures.

Booz-Allen has worked on building business-to-business marketplaces for clients. "Many of our clients are asking us to take equity positions in B-to-B marketplaces because a lot of these ventures are cash-starved," says Michael Katz, senior VP of IT at Booz-Allen. "But doing so is only viable if you're a manufacturing company that has solid products to sell."

Booz-Allen employs products from LiveLink, Oracle, and PeopleSoft to streamline its business processes. Within the past year, the company has migrated its business-operations databases to a new financial package. "We've also put in a Cognos business-intelligence software product for reporting, an off-the-shelf financial package that has multicurrency capabilities, and have moved to Oracle on the back end," Katz says. "It's created a much more accessible database where we can access real-time data from anywhere in the world."

Since May, ABM Industries Inc., the largest facility-services contractor listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has begun taking advantage of a client-server-based ERP product so that it will have one platform for product distribution and customer-service systems. The company has some 200 offices which, according to chief technology officer Anthony Lackey, used to be run like 200 separate companies.

A traditional distributed company with lots of offices has heterogeneous environments across its locations, he says. When it needs to deploy an application among hundreds of servers in data centers at numerous locations, the task can be very difficult. For about a year, ABM has been using Microsoft's Windows terminal servers and Citrix Systems Inc.'s MetaFrame to alleviate that problem. "Thin-client implementation has become a real trend in the industry," Lackey says. "There's been a lot of consolidation within our industry, and we'll need to make sure we have consistent services and solutions across all the properties we're managing." ABM once had about 20 data centers, hundreds of LAN servers, and several E-mail systems. Now it will save $19 million within five years on infrastructure because of investments in thin-client technology, Lackey says.

"Our thin-client implementation eliminated 22 data centers and 1,600 to 1,700 PCs in favor of terminals and eliminated 150 LAN E-mail servers," Lackey says. "It completely standardized the company on PC apps so all 2,600 of our desktop users work off the same versions of the same software applications and their data is stored in a repository in our first-class data centers."

In addition, the company plans to continue to upgrade its infrastructure to frame relay, replacing old branch-office applications with proprietary ones it has developed internally.

Partnerships with other large companies also have become a trend among prominent business and consulting firms trying to leverage the Internet. Through partnerships, Kelly Services has developed E-catalogs for its market. The company is working with partners to automate processes for time-capture and approval of logged hours so it can complete customer billing faster and more efficiently.

"We're positioning ourselves to be as efficient as possible," White says, "whether our customers want electronic transactions or phone transactions."

Illustration by Jeffrey Fisher
Photograph of Kincaid by Eric Futran
Photograph of White by Dwight Cendrowski

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