Channel 3 Consulting

Summary

How Channel 3 Consulting retired several legacy systems and spreadsheets in favour of CMap’s single source of truth.

Situation

As digital healthcare consultancy Channel 3 Consulting grew bigger, it accumulated a range of standalone systems for customer relationship management (CRM), timesheets, expenses, and time off. Also, it relied on spreadsheets for other business processes, including resource management, revenue recognition, job costing, and project management. As a result, the firm’s data was siloed, and creating reports was a manual and laborious task.

“For instance, almost weekly, someone had to download timesheets out of the time-keeping system and then paste the information into a spreadsheet to conduct analysis and reconcile data,” said Nick Deman, CFO of Channel 3 Consulting. “That process was extremely time-consuming. Among other things, this made it difficult to get a consolidated view of our resourcing.”

According to Nick, staff utilization is one of the firm’s key metrics. He needed a real-time view of the firm's resource plans in one place to quickly see who was doing what and where they were, and he needed this solution quickly.

Garwood Solutions, an advisory firm, worked with Channel 3 Consulting to define the solution Nick was looking for and issue a request for proposal to find a suitable vendor. Channel 3 Consulting selected CMap from the six vendors that responded to the request.

‍

‍

Solution

Functioning as an end-to-end CRM and Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform, CMap helps professional service firms to win more work and deliver it more profitably. The platform eliminates the need to rely on spreadsheets and multiple systems that don’t work well together. When firms use CMap, they have all the data and functionality they need on one unified and highly accessible platform.

The CMap team collaboratively shaped an implementation plan with Channel 3 Consulting, and after successfully working through process planning and data migration, the transition to CMap was completed on schedule. Channel 3 Consulting retired its previous application for CRM and HR and now relies on CMap for these areas. While the firm still uses another platform for marketing and both early-stage pipeline and account management, “once that early-stage opportunity progresses, we’ll move that information into the CMap pipeline to handle financial forecasting,” said Nick.

Now Channel 3 Consulting has a single source of truth to help manage the firm, and information is accessible through any web browser at the management’s convenience. 

Results

• Retired Legacy Platforms and Systems - “CMap provides us with an end-to-end solution,” said Nick. “As a direct result of using CMap, we were able to retire the many platforms and systems that we used previously, making it easier to manage our firm.”
• Improved Resourcing Capabilities - “I like that resourcing is all in one place, with a combined view across current and pipeline projects, and that insight has been a big win,” said Nick. “Given our headcount and project growth, it would be challenging to operate the business as we did before CMap.
• Better Reporting - “The reporting functionality is great,” said Nick. “We can build as many reports as we choose. Again, those reports give us wonderful insight into our business operations.”

‍

All content in this case study has been approved by the client. The views and opinions expressed are the client's alone.