PRODYNA’s Tips for a Successful ERP Transformation

IT transformation can be hard for large organisations. Especially those that have accumulated numerous systems and process over time.  For IT consultancy PRODYNA, Deltek Maconomy provided the solution needed to unite its IT ecosystem — and taught the company four important lessons along the way.

Founded in 1991, PRODYNA provides a unique combination of creative, innovative, and technical IT services. Its goal is to deliver the tools and custom software solutions its clients need to improve their customer experience, digitalisation and cloud-computing strategies. But, in 2016 PRODYNA decided to undertake an IT transformation of its own.

“We kicked-off an internationalisation and growth strategy in 2013, which gave us a list of new requirements we needed to implement,” says Christoph Körner, one of PRODYNA’s founders. “Three years later, we faced major limitations with our existing systems and knew it was time for a change.”

The company’s existing IT landscape wasn’t just limited, but complicated too, with different systems in place for operations in Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, UK, Serbia, the US, and Western Europe. Multiple sub-suppliers and accountants in different countries, each sharing data and reports through their own systems, only added to the complexity.

PRODYNA’s goal was to integrate this sprawling suite of applications into a single ERP instance. In doing so, it aimed to simplify compliance, improve efficiency, eliminate process blind spots, and gain visibility into projects that often span teams and borders.

“It was clear to us that we needed a single system to support us along the entire service supply chain of our business,” says Körner.

A fully-integrated approach to ERP

After assessing five potential suppliers, PRODYNA saw that Deltek Maconomy’s project-centric ERP tools offered several advantages over the competition. The solution is designed to maximise end-user productivity, with industry and role-specific functionality providing much faster time to value than generic ERP solutions.

“Maconomy had the completeness of required features, promised seamless integration, and offered a modern technology stack with open APIs and an interesting roadmap,” says Körner. “It was also the right size for our business and came in at the perfect price point for us.”

With Maconomy, PRODYNA now has a fully-integrated ERP system from which it can control resource planning, project management, invoicing and expense processes, subscription handling, and much more — essentially, everything that was previously the job of a sprawling suit of apps. And everyone, no matter where they are, is working from the same page. This means it’s much easier for PRODYNA to outsource activities and save money without having to worry about adding unnecessary complexity.

Overall, PRODYNA’s processes are now faster and business leaders have complete visibility into the status of all staff and projects. The company uses a data warehouse to gain a high-level overview of its business and, thanks to the open APIs in Maconomy, can build its own dashboards and reports. This provides everyone with the data they need, when they need it so they can make better decisions and avoid unnecessary communications.

“Fast reporting is really important to us,” says Körner. “At least once a week, if not more, we have fresh reports providing information on the utilisation of our teams and billability to help us optimise efficiency. This has been especially important during the pandemic.”

PRODYNA’s Secrets to Success

ERP projects of this scale can be a complex undertaking. On the back of PRODYNA’s success, we asked Körner for his top tips for a seamless transformation.

1. Choose the right vendor

“For us, the key to our success was the team behind the project. There are plenty of reports of why ERP implementations fail, and it’s usually down to ineffective project teams and project management. We had a great relationship with Deltek from the very beginning. And it’s still improving now, as Deltek learns more and more about our business and our requirements.”

2. Do not underestimate the effort involved

“You have to approach these activities properly. That means not running your transformation project as a side-project or trying to integrate it into your daily business activities. It simply won’t work. You need to know the processes you want to change, build a capable and effective project team, and make sure you dedicate the required resources from the beginning.”

3. Do proper stakeholder management

“It’s really important to involve your users in this process. And make sure you don’t underestimate the timeframe they will need to adapt to a new system. You have to factor in planning, training and knowledge-sharing, and for us this took around three years. We were operational in June 2017 and we’re still learning now — although the good news is, we did experience benefits right away.”

4. Be single-minded

“After the implementation, make sure you use all the capabilities available to you, and try to do everything in your new system. If you can avoid incorporating other systems and third-party capabilities, then you can prevent adding unnecessary complexity —which was what we were trying to avoid to begin with.” 

Learn more about how Maconomy ERP helps maximise end user productivity through industry and role-specific functionality.