UNITY AG
Against the backdrop of continuous growth, the management consulting firm UNITY conducted a comprehensive review of its IT landscape. The analysis revealed that no single system fully met UNITY’s process requirements. To ensure efficient corporate management going forward, a new IT architecture comprising various systems was developed. Within this overall framework, the individual systems are utilized to leverage their respective strengths. For end-to-end rolling planning, which is an essential component of corporate management, Board is used in conjunction with Microsoft SQL Server as the central BI platform.
The Company: Consulting for Innovation and Transformation
UNITY is a management consulting firm specializing in innovation and transformation, empowering global players, mid-sized companies, and public-sector clients to navigate the digital transformation in a future-proof and sustainable manner. As a thought leader with deep technological expertise, UNITY helps its clients become pioneers in their industries.
UNITY is a member of UNITY Innovation Alliance AG. This strong network of companies supports its clients in the digital transformation of business models, products, and services with end-to-end expertise—from conception to implementation. UNITY Innovation Alliance has more than 800 employees, 380 of whom work in management consulting. UNITY has received numerous awards for its excellent project work and as an outstanding employer—including being named “Germany’s Digital Pioneer” by the F.A.Z., receiving the “Best of Consulting” award from WirtschaftsWoche, being recognized as a “Top Consulting Firm” by Handelsblatt, and named a “Top Employer for SMEs” by Focus.
The facts at a glance:
✓ Real-time single source of truth
✓ Rolling planning for efficient business management
✓ Continuous transparency
Complex organizational structure versus outdated IT systems
UNITY’s IT systems faced five key challenges. First, technical issues and limitations arose because applications such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Office, and Board were no longer up to date, causing technical difficulties—particularly during data exchange.
Another problem was the ongoing evolution of processes since the systems were first introduced. The outdated technology was unable to support these new processes effectively—or at all—which led to the emergence of so-called “side organizations.” These included, for example, extensive Excel spreadsheets. The need for innovative processes and structures therefore necessitated the implementation of new system functionalities. The introduction of these parallel structures also had an impact on human resources management, as their manual maintenance led to bottlenecks in HR. At the same time, manual maintenance resulted in increasing data ambiguity, as this approach both increased the error rate and created uncertainty regarding the timeliness of the data.
In addition, the high administrative burden posed a significant problem, especially with a workforce of over 200 employees. Even with just 150 employees, the first signs of this challenge were already evident to everyone. The matrix organization, which divided the company into business units and competence centers, brought with it further organizational requirements. The four competence centers encompassed Strategic Corporate Management, Development Management, Production and Digital Planning, and IT Management. These complex challenges, particularly those related to outdated systems, ultimately necessitated a comprehensive overhaul of UNITY’s entire IT architecture.
The Solution: A Consistent Understanding Through Process Modeling
The internally formed project team first analyzed all functional areas and existing processes. Based on the results and requirements, new target business processes were then developed. Using the OMEGA method (Object-Oriented Method for Business Process Modeling and Analysis) developed at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute and the OMEGA Process Modeller® modeling tool employed by UNITY, the team developed the optimized processes. UNITY has been using OMEGA in its projects since 1995. OMEGA has proven itself as a tool for the concise visualization of processes. The method allows for the quick and straightforward creation of a uniform understanding of workflows, information flows, and material flows.
Once the processes had been defined, the project team began the system selection process. This revealed that no single system could meet all the requirements. The project team therefore decided to orchestrate the new IT architecture—that is, to support end-to-end processes using various coordinated systems. The goal was to leverage the advantages and strengths of each software solution. The challenge in IT orchestration—that is, the integration of processes and systems—is to ensure that the individual IT systems interlock in a modular fashion and thus work together as a harmoniously functioning whole. This is achieved when each software is used only in the functional area where it excels.
In doing so, the same functions must not be implemented redundantly in two different systems. Furthermore, it must be clearly defined which system is the master and which are the subordinate or subsystems. One specific challenge, for example, was that no single system could map capacity planning end-to-end, from the initial sales opportunity through to the order. However, this end-to-end planning was a fundamental requirement of the management consulting firm. Consequently, Board—which UNITY was already using for analyses—was also deployed as a rolling planning tool. To this end, UNITY brought in consultants from celver AG, as they possess a fundamental understanding of the consulting market and UNITY’s business. Furthermore, as business intelligence and corporate performance management specialists, the celver consultants are well-versed in consolidating data from various systems as well as in data feedback. Together, they designed a target architecture in which the respective applications, with their core competencies, could meet UNITY’s requirements.
This makes the BI platform the core element (master system) of the new IT architecture—and, at the same time, the company’s central planning tool. On the one hand, it handles commercial planning related to fees. On the other hand, Board, in combination with MS SQL Server as a data warehouse (DWH), serves as the integrating element of the system architecture, enabling the complete exchange of data between the various systems. Previous siloed solutions—such as capacity planning via Excel spreadsheets—are now a thing of the past. Rolling capacity planning now ensures optimal utilization of consultants. All stakeholders plan centrally in Board and, depending on their area of responsibility, also use CRM, Outlook, Microsoft SharePoint, or NAV—but only within the system’s core functionality. For example, the business unit manager maintains their sales opportunity—that is, their prospect of closing a contract—in CRM, but enters the commercial data such as prices and quantities in Board.
Similarly, the business unit manager checks employee availability and schedules free capacity for his sales opportunity. Depending on how close the contract signing is, he can already assign specific employees to the upcoming project. The capacity information for this comes from Outlook, where consultants maintain their actual and planned days. Thanks to the continuous data exchange via the DWH, supported by Board, the current status is available in real time to all stakeholders across all systems. The Hybrid Board Engine (Dual-Engine) enables MOLAP and ROLAP. This allows for both real-time transparency in all directions and comprehensive multidimensional analyses to be quickly realized. Maintain, review, approve: All employees across all hierarchies must follow these three principles. For the billing process, this means that consultants review and approve their days in Board from Outlook.
The next step involves review and final approval of the billing by the responsible project manager. This data is then fed into a Reporting Services report, which generates activity reports for each employee, and is also sent via the data warehouse to the SharePoint archive, as well as used for invoicing and posting to NAV. Authorized Board users can view billing information for the respective past months. Similarly, the business unit manager, for example, can access the sent quote, which was created in the CRM but stored as a Word and PDF document on SharePoint. From a management perspective, Board answers questions regarding contribution margins in various areas as well as the respective monthly results in terms of sales and revenue.
The interaction of the systems, with the BI platform serving as the central master system, meets all the requirements of a growing consulting firm with a complex organizational structure. Integrated rolling planning is a key success factor in the active management of the company—at every level: from employees to business unit heads and competence center heads, all the way up to the Executive Board. The new IT architecture ensures that everyone involved is working with the same data and information—regardless of the time or the system it comes from. Through the modular orchestration in the IT 3.0 project, we have successfully automated the core business processes. This enables efficient corporate management.
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