How Unit4 helps service-based businesses transform their operations
Unit4 has over 4 decades of experience designing enterprise software for people-centric organizations. Our experience with service-based businesses is particularly varied, and we’ve provided solutions for a variety of different companies that trade in the time and expertise of their people.
In this blog, we’re going to take a quick look at 3 businesses, the challenges they faced, and how our solutions have helped to overcome them, creating a smoother operating environment and a better experience for their people.
Customs4Trade – helping to scale a startup talent culture from scratch with Unit4 Talent Management
Customs4Trade has created a technology platform that helps organizations overcome the complexity of customs, excise, and international trade. They’re a thriving business that has worked hard to preserve a startup’s approach to managing its talent at scale.
Using our platform, C4T has created a culture of continuous engagement monitoring, with a cumulative engagement score of over 70% as measured by their frequent engagement pulse surveys – rising to 100% in business units with strong team leads.
Making people a core priority for the business is reflected in low attrition and allows the company to preserve its culture even through a period of rapid growth that saw a 100% increase in recurring revenue. Unit4 Talent Management gives them the ability to flexibly manage all employees, set clear objectives at every level of the company, and proactively act on all feedback they receive from all 125 of their staff across multiple countries. Creating a sustainable foundation to scale talent culture with any future growth.
“One of the best measures of the success of this talent management platform is that C4T has extremely low staff turnover. Unit4 has a role to play in supporting that loyalty. By connecting insights from all aspects of the employee journey, we are improving the employee experience, which results in a more satisfied team of people.” – Ilse Vermeersch, C4T Co-Founder
See C4T’s full story here
Migros Aare is now budgeting and forecasting accurately with Unit4 FP&A solutions
Migros Aare is a cooperative of Switzerland’s largest retail company Migros, with 125 supermarkets and more than 6,000 employees in its supermarket unit. The organization knew that it was essential to finely balance the predicted daily in-store sales number with the cost number for the full-time equivalent (FTE) personnel, so demand must be optimally matched with supply.
Partnering with Unit4, Migros Aare needed to make sure the right personnel was working at the right times to deliver the very best retail experience and to reduce the level of sales-to-personnel cost deviation between monthly forecasts and actuals.
While they had many KPIs already in place for sales, people hours, and personnel costs, they were not fully connected on a daily basis. This was resulting in store managers not having all the independent drivers available, and therefore, they were unable to use them for good forecasting or effective measures. There was no predictive algorithm to support people cost planning and top-down/bottom-up forecasting.
The Retail Performance Management system (Unit4 FP&A) now provides high levels of interlinked forecast accuracy for sales and personnel costs. The solution is being used in all 125 Migros Aare supermarkets and in its restaurants and specialist stores. The organization achieved full project return on investment (ROI) in less than 8 months. It now has 99.9% forecast accuracy for personnel costs, and 75% of stores have over-achieved in personnel cost targets compared to 45% in the previous year.
“For Migros Aare, the most important thing is interlinked forecast accuracy. Collaboration with Unit4 has enabled us to achieve this with a gradual building-block approach.” – Theres Stephan, Project Manager, Migros Aare
See Migros Aare’s full story here
Qvantel leverages Unit4 ERP to pursue a unique bottom-up approach to digital transformation
Qvantel is a Finland-based company helping to accelerate the digitization of telecom operators worldwide.
With data spread across more than 10 silos, inadequate visibility of customer projects, and a lack of ability to coherently plan or forecast, they realized they needed to adopt a new cloud ERP that could support a transition to a project-driven operations model.
In an environment of 50% year-on-year growth, Qvantel knew an ERP implementation would carry a significant risk to the business. And thus, they embarked on a highly unconventional path to transformation.
Unit4 was selected for our capability to deploy our own solution, our strong performance in a live demo, and for our willingness to design and agree a custom array of processes that could run within Qvantel as soon as rollout was complete.
Rather than starting with global processes like finance and HR – which often have the most complex requirements for an ERP solution – Qvantel chose to pursue their transformation from the ground up in those areas with the greatest need to evolve their ways of working.
This bottom-up approach minimized risk to operations and the risk of falling short of meeting the key goal of migrating to a new way of working.
So far, Qvantel has one huge key strategic benefit from Unit4 ERP – a shift to a dynamic operating and management model that makes work much simpler and more efficient. Seamless links now exist from key business processes to people and support processes.
Beyond this, Qvantel estimates a 30% improvement in operational efficiency, experiences better alignment to the company strategy, enjoys a single source of truth for data and business information, and an improved employee experience across their technology estate that saves time and is easier to use.
“Unit4 ERP is an instrumental factor in setting the company up for continued growth internationally, with a transformation to dynamic forecasting, planning, and tracking globally. It also empowers people for common direction, faster decision making, and agility.” – Kaj Wikstrom, CFO, Qvantel
See Qvantel’s full story here
How can Unit4 help you?
To discover more about our solutions and learn what they can do to help your business elevate its operations and free its people to do better work, check out our professional services industry resource hub or click here to book a live demo.
