PlanB Consulting

Situation

PlanB Consulting are a business continuity, crisis management, and cybersecurity consulting firm based in Glasgow, UK. Beginning as a husband-and-wife team in 2007, the firm rapidly gained attention over the years, expanding their offices from Scotland to Dubai as they worked with one-man-band firms to global outfits.

Thinking big led to the firm’s acquisition by Databarracks this year, rocketing their staff size from 12 to 100+. With a significantly larger scale of resources, projects, and financials to manage, Kim Maclean Bristol, Director, knew they needed a platform capable of aiding them through the process - and far beyond.

Since their inception, PlanB have implemented a range of project management and finance tools, aided by spreadsheets, to manage their daily operations, but found themselves trapped in periods of “endless implementation”. Even solutions they did manage to eventually implement, like WorkflowMax, “just weren’t advanced enough” in Kim’s opinion.

In her search for a superior solution, Kim found CMap.

"Even as a very small organization, we always thought big and had good processes, and we knew that this what we needed to do."

‍

Solution

PlanB chose CMap’s PSA edition - an industry-tailored combination of operations, finance, and CRM - because they were impressed by its intuitiveness and advanced timesheets, resourcing, and financial capabilities.

The first thing that stood out to Kim was how easy to use the platform was: “It seemed really intuitive, and that’s what I liked about it.”  

But the other “brilliant” thing? CMap’s timesheets. “In consulting, timesheets are really important - they’re everyone’s nightmare, but they’re the only way you can keep a handle on the profitability of jobs,” said Kim.  

The customizability of CMap’s timesheets meant that anyone within the firm could achieve the level of detail they required, catering to different methods of recording time. “We had issues with previous systems where you couldn’t put time against a job you weren’t set to be working on - in CMap, anyone can put time against any job.”

CMap keeps PlanB’s finance team happy, too: “Finance are so excited about recognized revenue - they use it to the extreme! They’ve never had such visibility over recurring revenue jobs.”

From a management perspective, Kim has also benefitted from increased visibility: “I have much more visibility of what’s happening - and what’s possible.” This isn’t just useful for general awareness - being able to see not just what is happening, but why it’s happening, has been instrumental to the firm.

“In the Fee Estimator, I can see not just whether the hours match at the end of a job, but why they did or didn’t. This puts us in a better position to avoid over or under-pricing in similar jobs,” Kim said. “I also haven’t had this level of visibility over pipeline before in any previous system.”

As PlanB have experienced in their recent acquisition when you’re in a larger set-up, you can no longer run on ‘gut feelings’; you need a business case: “CMap doesn’t just validate what I already knew - it provides justification and a business case when going to the board.”

"CMap is absolutely brilliant for people who do chargeable work."

‍

Results

• Increased visibility – With improved visibility over key business processes and projects, PlanB are placed in a better position to make strong decisions going forward.

• Smoother invoicing – “Expenses can be put straight against a client for invoicing, which was such a headache to do without CMap,” said Kim. “It goes quite a long way.”

• Improved resourcing – “The resourcing functionality in CMap is absolutely brilliant,” said Kim.