‍Optima Partners is an advanced data and business consultancy who partner with leading consumer brands to drive transformation and catalyse customer-centricity.  Their profound expertise in customer strategy, innovative design, and cutting-edge data science and engineering empowers organisations to evolve.

The firm work with a number of clients from various sectors, including Financial Services. Telecoms, Energy and Pharma and Biotech.  Optima specialises in unlocking latent value, through a three-pronged approach that focuses on identifying and enhancing value for customers, within the customer base, and within the business itself.  In doing so, they foster sustainable value, paving the way for consistent business growth.

iQlink has been established for nearly 20 years, and is focussed on the delivery of business process solutions on the Salesforce platform. They support customers in Professional Services (consulting) and Legal sectors using the Kantata SX (formerly Kimble) PSA and Salesforce CRM solutions.  In addition, they have developed a core competency for interfacing and integrating between Kantata SX, Salesforce.com and a wide range of non-Salesforce platform solutions.

Over the first three years of iQlink’s engagement, Optima’s revenues doubled, permanent staff trebled, gross margin increased by a third, and the firm raised millions of pounds through a first-round investment from BGF.

iQlink provided:

●     Business consulting on process change to increase performance

●     Major reconfigurations of the system to accommodate the evolving business model

●     Operational system management and maintenance, upgrades, issue resolution

The iQlink team started work with Optima in 2020.  The engagement comprised a business consultant (who advised on organisation, metrics and working practices) and functional/technical consultants (who advised on and undertook configuration work, report customisation and admin of the Kantata SX system).

1.       Business change to increase performance

Optima was expanding and shifting its business model from mainly associate-based project delivery towards employee-delivered revenue.  It was also building up a new Data Science practice to complement the management consulting for which it was known. Optima is one of the leading UK boutique consulting businesses focused on customer-centric strategies for large business-to-consumer brands.

These changes created new challenges in several areas.  One area was sales - selling and sales forecasting needed to be opened out to include more people.  There was scope to professionalise the team’s approach and ensure that the information used for business forecasting and planning was more reliable.  Another key area was resource planning - monitoring and managing utilisation, and the timing of recruitment.

iQlink’s business consultant’s initial focus was in developing a more consistent sales and sales forecasting process.  Regular meetings, that centred on the information about opportunities in the system, nurtured a common understanding of the sales cycle and how to assess win-probability and close date.  The team was able to improve the accuracy of quarterly revenue forecasts, and to satisfy the founder/CEO that best efforts were being made. Trust in the forecast increased.

This enabled the business to plan more effectively: resource planning was streamlined, and employee utilisation was improved.  The consultant also helped devise a new incentive scheme that aligned management with shareholders - it focused on gross profit and operating profit. Changes were also made to accountability for engagements and delivery forecasting.

2.       Re-configuration of the operational system to support these changes

The iQlink team worked with Optima to reconfigure the core operational system (Kantata SX) to report on forecast / actual performance in line with accountability for accounts, service lines, practices, and engagements.  This provided managers with easy access to real-time information about their portfolios and a means of keeping data up to date.  One key improvement in working practices was the shift from monthly to weekly time recording.

All of this required major reworking of Kantata SX set-up and deep expertise in report configuration in the Salesforce/Kantata SX platform.  Periodic ‘snapshotting’ was developed to allow a comparison of planned forecasts with actual performance.  Custom home pages were set up to allow account owners and engagement managers to easily find information about purchase order consumption and profitability.

The executive team now has the ability to ‘slice and dice’ performance information, and report to the board with more confidence.

3.       Kantata SX operational system management and maintenance

During the project, the iQlink team met weekly with the members of the Optima finance, operations and marketing team to prioritise backlog improvement items, resolve technical and data issues, and conduct testing upgrades and enhancements.

This included a smooth upgrade to the Salesforce Lightning interface and the continuous finessing of performance reporting and presentation.  iQlink handled support tickets with the product vendor (Kantata).

Conclusion

The iQlink team has enabled Optima to improve business performance as it grows.  Optima has made shifts in business practice that have increased alignment across the business and key stakeholders, and they are selling, resourcing and fulfilling engagements more effectively and profitably.

For more information please contact info@iQlink.co.uk

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