Business Performance Management

Executive Summary

A specialty paper manufacturer revamped critical sales systems to enable business continuity and growth through a significant acquisition.

Case Background

Industry: Consumer products; paper and construction materials manufacturing
Company: A 100-year-old global manufacturing operation with sales of more than $3B in 50 countries

Key Challenges and Goals

Due to an impending merger, the client needed to evaluate and rationalize key business systems for performance and risk management purposes. A critical sales and marketing system for a large operating division was used at the time by 100 employees. After the merger, the system would need to support over 300 employees on a daily basis and business operations worth nearly $1B. Given the large amount of revenue involved, the client needed to assure system and application capacity, availability, performance, and resilience.

Affinity's Approach and Solutions

Affinity performed an in-depth evaluation of the application, systems, and network for current and anticipated post-merger requirements. We gathered relevant data over a representative period in order to accurately evaluate trends and identify causal factors. This evaluation uncovered that the current system and configuration would not support the increased workload; in fact, the client had already begun to experience negative impact on performance under current business demands. We also provided a technical pro forma report that identified required changes, which included minor investments in architecture and hardware, as well as configuration changes.

Results

By implementing Affinity's recommendations, the client was able not only to sustain 300% expansion of its sales system usage, but to also significantly reduce system and performance risks, ultimately yielding increased reliability. The expected payback period was less than 90 days, with gross ROI measured at more than 400%.

Project Snapshot

Technology: HPUX systems; customized Eloquence database application; Cognos software; distributed Windows-based PCs

Affinity expertise applied:
-Capacity planning (system and network)
- Risk management
- Business continuity and business resilience planning
- IT/technical strategy and architecture
- Change management
- Enterprise, client and service management systems
- Project management

Project duration: 90 days

Cost range: $25K to $50K including hardware and services