SP: Did you have any performance measurement challenges as you moved to a more streamlined [operational] approach?
Guba: The problem was being able to get at the data. Since the data wasn't available centrally, it was very difficult to set up KPIs and metrics. I'll give you an example. Until recently, we didn't even have a consolidated view of labor. We had no idea of how many hours of labor per week we were utilizing. In a service company, that's a horrible situation to be in. The independent companies had a better line of sight into what their local operations did, but when we took a look at the business units as a whole we had no overall visibility. You can't scale 27 independently run operations, but when you consolidate them you have transparency into the entire business. And we can very easily scale this business now with the new processes and systems we have in place.

We're just beginning to get the benefit of some of the systems that we implemented. We can now see labor burn across the company, we can see sales and project pipelines, we can look at productivity. We're just at the point where we can start creating and looking at the KPIs necessary to run the business.

SP: With so many disparate systems out there, even for something as simple as the utilization of people you probably had different ways of looking at it -- different definitions, different formats --which must have made it really tough.
Guba: We did. As you would expect, we had different charts of accounts. It was really all over the place.

SP: What are you working on in the planning and forecasting area now?
Guba: Several of us come from companies that have very sophisticated and sound capabilities in terms of operations, analysis, strategic management, and forecasting, so our expectations are fairly high in terms of our ability to see what's coming and to navigate the business to reach a desired result. But this business never had that capability, so we had to create it.

We've made investments in financial planning and analysis talent. We've put systems in place to get at the data so that we can start looking at some of the KPIs and the operating drivers that underlie the financial results. And we're building modeling capabilities so that we can get a better sense of how operating performance metrics and KPIs are tied into financial results.

That's still in its infancy because we've just recently built some of the tools. We now have the talent on board that knows how to look at the data. We've got the systems in place that can give us the data, and now we just have to sit down and start connecting the dots and providing the tools to the business.

SP: Are you driving that through SAP as well?
Guba: We have a plan to utilize SAP's forecasting module. We haven't implemented that yet because we've had our hands full, frankly, with our three system implementations. Part of the challenge is to identify the underlying operating metrics that have a high correlation to financial results. SAP's forecasting tool will give us a more sophisticated system once implemented. We're currently taking steps to get the fundamentals built.

Read more of the Finance Transformation interview with Randy Guba.