1. September 12-14, 2018
Raleigh, NC

2. Improving Decision Making
By information sharing
At Full Sail Partners

3. Who is Full Sail Partners
My name is Wendy Gustafson, I am the General Manager of Full Sail Partners. We are a software reseller and consulting firm. We primarily focus on Deltek Vision ERP software geared to professional services firms. We are a virtual firm with employees, clients and opportunities across the US (and recently into South Africa, Europe and Australia).
I am an accountant by trade and have been working in a professional services firm for the last 20+ years 12 of which has been with Full Sail Partners.
We use the ERP software that we consult on … We like to call it we eat our own dog food. Over the years, we discovered we, as well as our clients, needed something more than what we could get native from the ERP system, so we started looking at various bi tools. Primarily we wanted something that was powerful, but easy to use and deploy. Since we are a professional services consulting firm, we also wanted something we could share with our clients.
We found Informer 5 after a year long search.
The above google map is off Full sail partners data.. Ironically it is the first graph we ever created in i5 as the mapping feature is extremely easy to use. The remaining data you will see is off one of our Deltek Demo databases, but using graphs and datasets we use internally.

4. How are you doing against goals?
Our philosophy is better information sharing allows the people in your organization to see their contribution to the overall results and allows them to make better decisions. Our way of doing this is setting goals for employees that we think will “drive” the business and providing ‘real time’ access to employees for them to see how they are performing.
This is an example of a ‘how are you doing against your goals’ dash part for a manager who is responsible for ‘doer/seller’ (consultant and BD). Goals are set at the periodic times and then reported against.

5. Focus on where your problems lie
We also use this to impart ‘top priorities’ knowledge. This can be done by the ‘sort by value’ feature in I5. Ranking your mangers by the ones with the most projects in trouble, or seeing just the 5 employees with the lowest utilization (ie in the example above) can help you prioritize your next steps.

6. While being able to see the detail
For me (being all accounting ‘ie’), the ability to easily get to the raw data to see exactly what the problem is was a key selling point of I5. I LIKE the charts and graphs, they help drive my eye, but if I have to go search out the data, then I get frustrated and throw up my hands in despair.
In this example, the Manager can drill down to see what projects are over budget

7. Some of the other uses we have found…
Share high level financial data with staff.
In this example, we are letting staff know how we spend our money at a very high level. For 2018, 63% of revenue was spent on Non Labor expenses charged directly to billable projects, 25% was spent on Labor and Benefits, 7% was spent on Overhead such as Rent and Utilities and 5% was kept as profit. All which adds up to 100% of the just over 12M billed

8. Some of the other uses we have found…
When travelling, easily see clients close by…
In this example a fictional employee is visiting San Francisco for a conference and wants to take time to visit any clients in the area.

9. Some of the other uses we have found…
Send pertinent information to managers and employees via (use judiciously).
We use this to let project managers know what cash came in the day before for their projects. We also use this to alert employees when the are behind on doing their timesheets – which is a lifeblood of a prof services firms.
We are coming up with new uses for I5 daily . I have employees asking me to pull together information for them regarding their clients or projects all the time. For our executive team all financial reporting now comes from informer – which allows me to simplify our reports while letting everyone dive deeper into the details at their leisure.
This has been a game changer for us