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News

Press Release: Thavron/Ranzal ITFM Partnership

EDGEWATER RANZAL AND THAVRON SOLUTIONS CREATE NEW ALLIANCE

White Plains, NY – August 7, 2017 – Edgewater Technology-Ranzal, LLC, (Edgewater Ranzal), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Edgewater Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: EDGW) and Cloud Select Platinum level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, is pleased to announce a new alliance with Thavron Solutions, a services management consulting company that assists both outsourced service providers and internal corporate service providers with driving value to their businesses.
This alliance unites our respective expertise and strengths to deliver a comprehensive Information Technology Financial Management (ITFM) solution to clients that provides a unified view of IT’s value to the business determined through a rigorous, disciplined, and transparent process, known as ITFM, governed through the offices of the CFO and CIO. Edgewater Ranzal’s cost management, planning, and business intelligence technical expertise complement Thavron’s strategic advisory services and trademarked business service success framework.
“With our continued growth and expansion, this partnership enables us to reach clients needing ITFM solutions,” said Robin Ranzal, President of Edgewater Ranzal. “An alliance with Thavron Solutions is mutually beneficial because our individual expertise combine to provide a complete solution,” she added.
“Our joint solution will allow us to help organizations reduce the time that IT Finance spends on managing business processes, give IT managers more detailed and timely data as well as provide Finance transparency across business goals,” stated Nan Braun, CEO of Thavron Solutions. “The partnership brings together Thavron’s consulting capabilities and data algorithms for ITFM and Business Services, and Edgewater Ranzal’s expert capabilities in designing for and implementing the Oracle Cloud solutions.”
“This collaboration brings a unique intersection of technology, strategy and implementation expertise to the ITFM space,” stated Matt Bradley, Senior Vice President, Product Development, Oracle. “We see a compelling opportunity to further strengthen the bonds between the offices of the CFO and CIO and bring a common language to the business,” added Bradley.
Both Edgewater Ranzal and Thavron Solutions will attend the 2017 World of IT Financial Management conference in New Orleans from August 7-11.

 
About Edgewater Ranzal
Edgewater Ranzal provides integrated business analytics solutions to help organizations define, measure, and innovate their business, provide a clear vision, and drive business value. We consistently apply and update leading practice methodologies to address changing business requirements and take advantage of evolving system capabilities. With global resources and multiple partnerships, we are one of the largest specialized business analytics solutions providers. To learn more, visit ranzal.com, e-mail info@ranzal.com, or call +1.914.253.6600.

About Thavron Solutions
Thavron Solutions is a Business Services consulting and technology solutions company that assists Fortune 500/Global 2000 companies in defining, modeling, costing, and managing their services to improve bottom line performance. Their customers include companies in TV and Entertainment, Public Utilities, Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, and many other industries. Thavron has expert knowledge leading customers in their management of IT Finance, Manufacturing, and HR services. To learn more, visit thavron.com, e-mail ccreasy@thavronsolutions.com, or call +1. 855.484.2876
About Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized is the latest version of Oracle’s partner program that provides partners with tools to better develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN Specialized offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle’s growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Key to the latest enhancements to OPN is the ability for partners to differentiate through Specializations. Specializations are achieved through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. To find out more visit http://www.oracle.com/partners.
Trademarks
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Company Contact:
Amy Ingram
Marketing Director
Edgewater Ranzal
1.914.253.6600

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Uncategorized

Metrics in Transition

“We need to compare Apples to Apples” 

This argument for not updating metrics after a process change is a logical fallacy that costs companies money every day. 

Changing the way that you deliver a service  frequently means a change in the metrics you use to manage your services- especially if you added an outsourced vendor into the mix. 

Let’s look at a specific example. 

When we work with Human Resource departments on their Talent Acquisition Service, the golden metric is either Time to Offer ( TTO) or Time to Fill ( TTF). 

Time to offer is the time it takes for an offer to get extended to a candidate from the date a requisition was created. When the entire process is owned by a company, this is a good measure of success for the business. 

Many companies are now outsourcing  the up front sourcing and screening of applicants and the new process looks more like this: 

In this case the new process steps are :

A) Creation of the Req and handoff to the outsource provider

B) Outsource provider sources and screens and presents a slate of candidates to the company hiring manager

C) Hiring Manager interviews, and company HR processes proceed to an offer where appropriate.

With our HROS cloud services, we have access to anonomized and normalized data from 100s of  large companies.  When we look at the overall data, the mean TTO is 60 days. 

When we break the process down, the mean for Segment C ( which is completely interlnal to the company) is 34.5 days. This means that more than half of the TTO time is controlled by the company, not the vendor. 

However,  TTO not to exceed XX days is still the success measure that most companies measure their outsourced vendors to ( it should obviously be the Time to Present to Hiring Manager). By keeping TTO as an “Apples to Apples” comparison, not only does the company lose visibility into the true effectiveness of the vendor, but they also lose visibility into the impact that they are having on the process and other internal opportunities to improve. 

While the urge to keep metrics the same to “show our improvement” is high after a process change, it is important to do the right analysis and have the correct new metrics and vendor SLAs built into the change. 

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Events Presentation Services TBM

When your world changes , how do you cope?

In Business, everything changes eventually.
If you have modeled your Service costs, there are lots of changes that require an update or change to the model.

    Things in your company/service can change:

  1. Has your company undergone a re-org?
  2. Are you using a new technology to deliver the service?
  3. Did you outsource all or part of the service?
  4. Did you change vendors? Are you changing the billing model for your customers?

    Your general philosophy toward service costing may have changed– perhaps you are maturing from a flat allocation to the business to a service consumption model.

    You may be changing tools that you use to model the Service costs. – is it time to put an automated model in place?

    Whatever the change, there is a likely impact to the actual cost of service and you will need to be able to explain why and how the service costing will change so that the business can be prepared. There is nothing worse that getting a bill and seeing a rate change in the bill for the first time.

    Recently at the ITFMA conference in Atlanta, we presented and had great discussion with the group on things to consider to rationalize and socialize a service costing change. It includes things to avoid (all of which are mistakes we have seen real customers make before we start with them) as well as things to be certain to include in your planning.

    Enjoy!

    If you are getting ready to embark on a project that impacts your services costs, please reach out to us for some deeper advice and engagement:



Categories
Data Events Presentation

Data Readiness Assessment- ITFMA Workshop Slides

While we never recommend an engagement that is supposed to “get your data ready” for a Service Costing or TCO activity, we strongly believe that a company should understand their data before they start engaging vendors and creating model designs.
Here are the workshop guide slides from our Workshop on this topic at the ITFMA conference in Atlanta this week. The Workshop had lots of great discussion and sharing among the particpants- thank you all. The second part of the workshop was outside of powerpoint, so is not included here.
If you want more information about our data assessment templates or how you can conduct these activities, please contact us.

Service Costing/TCO Data Assessment from Thavron Solutions LLC
Categories
Services TBM

The Service Portfolio Management Maturity Curve

ServicePortfoliomaturity We often hear organizations convincing themselves that they couldn’t possibly get the data needed to do comprehensive Service Portfolio Management. The truth is that every organization has the data they need to start their journey to maturity. Many companies start with a basic cost/consumption dashboard and then grow that as they mature the internal data sources that provide metrics on project investment, SLA performance, risk and SVA (Service Value Agreements) performance. Starting the journey is the first step toward maturity- contact us for more information on how to get started today.

Categories
Services TBM

ServiceNow’s Service Costing vs ITFM Modules

iStock_000005703253_LargeAt the recent ServiceNow Knowledge15 conference, there was growing buzz around the new ITFM module, but some confusion around how the new module would compare with the already existing Service Costing module. Once you understand how they both work,the difference becomes clear and the possibilities for how they can work together are exciting.

The Service Costing module has been around for a bit, and is based on each service having a set “cost”. The confusion enters because ServiceNow calls this a “cost”, when it is really a “rate” or “price”. It is a set, fixed amount that a customer would have to pay for the Service. This is very useful for companies who are fairly mature in their TBM journey and are ready to use a P*Q methodology for either Showback or Chargeback to the business. In this case the P (Price) is the rate or “Cost” that is set in the Service Costing module and the Q (Quantity) is the quantity of the service being requested by the customer. Using this module assumes that you understand the cost composition of your services in order to set a reasonable price (cost to the consumer) and that the business is ordering services in specific quantities.
Most companies get stuck on knowing what rate to set for their services, because they do not understand the cost composition of their services. This is where the new ITFM module comes into play.
The new ITFM module is the newest entry in a landscape of tools that includes Apptio, VMWare’s ITBM, and Upland Software’s ComSci, among others. This new ServiceNow module allows you to model the cost composition of services using your financial data combined with the operational data already in ServiceNow or other IT Operational Systems. For companies who have little insight in the cost composition of their services,we recommend implementing a modeling tool like this so that they can measure and monitor their actual costs ( internal to IT) as well as variance to Budget, and learn enough to be able to set a reasonable rate.
With both modules in place, Service Owners as well as IT executives get the transparency and insight they need to manage the cost of services to the rate ( or price) they are charging.

Categories
Services TBM

Service Portfolio Management Dashboard- a Sneak Peek

ServicePortfolioDashboard1ServicePortfolioDashboard2 We have had a lot of excitement this week, previewing our Service Portfolio Management Dashboard built in ServiceNow on top of the ITFM module and wanted to share with a wider audience here. This dashboard will at first only be available to our ServiceNow ITFM customers and leverages the power of Explore Analytics Visualization platform to bring together the Cost, Consumption, Performance, Risk and Value metrics into one convenient dashboard. The quad bubble chart leverages a Thavron algorithm to calculate Business Value and Business Prioritization of Services so that execcutives can quickly and easily see where to focus resources. Contact us for demos and more information.

Categories
Events

A new partnership for new service insights

As we begin to built on the new ServiceNow ITFM module, we are excited to announce a new partnership with Explore Analytics that will allow us to bring exciting new Dashboards to our customers. Below is the official press release:

Kokomo, IN, April 21, 2015– Thavron Solutions, LLC is excited to announce a partnership with Explore Analytics to provide advanced graphic dashboards and KPIs for IT Financial Management and Business Service analytics for their customers on the ServiceNow platform.
“Explore Analytics allows us to easily integrate both ServiceNow and other data sources and embed those elements in specialized dashboards within ServiceNow for our ITFM and Business Service Customers. The advanced graphical components native to Explore Analytics with drill down capability allow us to provide the dashboards and reporting our customers demand”, said Nan Braun, CEO of Thavron Solutions.
“This is an exciting opportunity to translate the power of Explore Analytics to meet the specific needs of our customers. Thavron brings an incredible wealth of knowledge of business service management and financial management, which they bring to our customers with pre-defined best practice dashboards and metrics,” said Gadi Yedwab, CEO and founder of Explore Analytics.
Companies wanting a demonstration of the portfolio dashboards should email info@thavronsolutions.com or contact them at https://thavron.com.
Thavron Solutions is a Business Service consulting and technology solutions company that assists Fortune 500/Global 2000 companies in defining, modeling, costing and managing their services to improve bottom line performance. Their customers include companies in TV and Entertainment, Public Utilities, Financial Services, and Pharmaceuticals. Thavron has particular expert knowledge leading customers in their management of IT, Manufacturing, Engineering and HR services.
Explore Analytics is a cloud-based Business Intelligence platform. Unleashing data across multiple data sources, the Explore Analytics application empower users to define their own real-time reports and publish rich, interactive views for web, mobile, and tablet. Get out of the data warehouse and connect to your information within minutes

Categories
Events Metrics Presentation Services

The IT Service Portfolio

Financial advisor giving advise to client

We were happy to lead a lively workshop full of discussion on the IT Service portfolio at the ITFMA conference in Norfolk.
The workshop covered the IT Service Portfolio definition, metrics and getting to real business value measurements. The Guide slides from that workshop are embedded here, or are available on SlideShare.
Be sure to contact us if we can answer any questions or assist you on your journey.

Categories
Services TBM

What are your terms of Service?

Hardworking man eating at his desk I wanted to shatter one of the biggest myths about Enterprise Business Services today.

Just because you bill( or showback) a service price (cost) monthly or quarterly, that number does not have to be driven by direct consumption of that service for the previous period.

How can I say this when it seems contrary to the Holy Grail of Service Consumption tracking?

At both ITFMA and ITFM Week this month ( is there something about tax month that drives finance folks to put conferences in April?) I have heard people struggle with customers who are grumpy when a change in consumption does not impact the bottom line directly.  Inevitably, as I talked with them I found out that they had forgotten to include a term (length) of the Service.

This is so common sense, it gets overlooked.

Every month, you likely pay for at least two kinds of services at home- bills driven by monthly consumption ( your utility bills are a perfect example of this) and a bill for items with large sunk costs that are a monthly amortization of those costs and have a minimum  time commitment ( your mortgage or your car payment).  If you stop living in your house, or stop driving your car you still have to pay those monthly charges, unless you transfer ownership to someone else.

When you have an Enterprise service that requires a large sunk cost, it is OK to design it so that there is a minimum time commitment that the consumer has to make.

Of course, it is true that your Enterprise may force you to think outside the box and find a way to provide that same service WITHOUT the sunk costs so they can be more flexible, but that is a topic for another post.