Consultant says built-in tracking devices can produce quick benefits

The emergence of enterprise portals as a tool for monitoring corporate performance raises an interesting question: what comes first, the portal or the data?

In other words, can you just link a portal to your existing IT network and immediately begin pulling meaningful information through it, or do you have to go through a long process of organizing and rationalizing data beforehand if you expect to make any sense of what shows up in the portal?

Richard Fontaine is VP of operations at Conceptum, an IT consulting firm based in Montreal. He says you don't have to go through a long data rationalization process to get immediate value from a portal, but you should have some idea of what you want to measure before the portal is installed.

The bulk of Conceptum's work involves implementing ERP suites from PeopleSoft, SAP, and IFS for manufacturers across Canada. But Fontaine formed his opinions about how soon a portal can produce tangible benefits after his company installed its own portal, which was part of the IFS suite.

"We had an idea about some of the performance indicators we wanted to track before installing the portal," Fontaine says, "but we were actually able to leverage the portal's functionality to revise those indicators, as well as to identify new ones."

One indicator that Conceptum knew it wanted to track beforehand was the ratio of billable versus non-billable hours reported by workers assigned to various projects.

That information comes from employee timesheets, which are managed by the human resources module in the IFS suite. So it was obvious that the portal needed to be connected to that module. With that link in place, Fontaine says, "I can click into the portal and see that ratio at any given time. Let's say it shows that 93 percent of all hours across the company for the month are billable. I can drill down and get a breakdown of each consultant's ratio."

Having immediate access to this data has helped Conceptum in numerous ways, including reducing the time it takes to collect revenue. "We use to have to wait until the end of the month before knowing how much billable time was spent on a project," Fontaine explains. "Now we can track that ongoing, and when the month ends on Friday, we send invoices out on Monday. "