Edelman

Edelman Public Relations is the leading global public relations firm with over 3,500 employees across 20 countries. As the leader in their field for over fifty years, Edelman is in the business of providing high quality professional services to brand name customers around the globe such as HP, eBay, Burger King and Samsung. With its financial systems and business processed derived in the pre-Facebook era, Edelman looked to transform its finance and professional services functions to reflect the new dynamic of global professional services management and social media.

The Background

The Global Financial System (GFS) project was a bold enterprise transformation initiative taken on by the firm over three years ago to move from its legacy systems to PeopleSoft 9.0 while improving business processes and associated controls. Having experienced substantial challenges during their original PeopleSoft implementation over ten years ago, the firm was very cautious in the approach and planning it took on the GFS effort. The effort was instituted with a well versed team of client resources who had full time commitment to GFS. Edelman's initial approach was to engage a large PeopleSoft delivery firm who applied their "one size fits all" approach to getting the implementation done. The project was challenged for months with the integrator's schedule delays, resource changes and lack of PeopleSoft knowledge. Mid way through the effort, the integrator even suggested to "scrap the project and start over". A pilot deployment was conducted in Canada with limited acceptance. At this point, the Edelman client team took control of the initiative from the delivery firm and focused on system improvements and training to "re-launch" the system in Canada.

The Challenge

With the initial go-live and re-launch of Canada complete, the focus turned to the core effort of getting the entire US population, over 70% of Edelman's user base, converted and live on PeopleSoft 9.0. Having unsuccessfully taken the large integrator's approach, Edelman sought to complement their strong client team with resources who understood how to work with clients in effectively planning and delivering large-scale deployments. They also sought resources that could bring deep PeopleSoft expertise and a "been there, done that" set of experiences to ensure the solution met the needs of the US population. If the US deployment was not successful, the other global locations would not be able to leverage GFS and the overall program would be a failure.

The Solution

When talking to trusted resources in the Oracle ecosystem, Edelman was referred to Collaborative Solutions. Shortly thereafter, Collaborative was engaged to provide the overall leadership for the planning and execution of the PeopleSoft-based GFS deployment in the US. In addition, Collaborative provided strong PeopleSoft leadership and subject matter experts to work with the client team in driving the critical areas of the implementation. This included leadership for legacy system conversion and end-to-end testing of the PeopleSoft 9.0 FSCM and ESA application modules. In addition, Collaborative Solutions provided leadership in project and change management to drive the transition of an Edelman subsidiary, StrategyOne, onto the PeopleSoft-based GFS prior to the US deployment.

The Results

With a hard target date and aggressive timeline, Collaborative was able to put a plan in place to meet the key milestones and deliver the solution efficiently and on time. The effort leveraged a combined team of on-site Edelman resources and offshore development that was able to deliver a successful GFS solution for Edelman. Specifically, this included updating the current PeopleSoft environment on maintenance packs and bundles, controlling scope to build a new set of the most essential functionality needed, conducting a complete business-based test of the system, executing and validating a series of complex conversions from the old system, and preparing the user community with tailored training to deliver the right knowledge to the right audience. The effort also included the successful deployment of GFS to a subsidiary organization prior to the actual US deployment. According to Paul Adams, Global CIO for Edelman, "The team from Collaborative did a phenomenal job for us. We dropped them into a project that was behind schedule and off track due to conflicting priorities and technology challenges. They quickly responded by delivering a sound project plan and getting the team to gel. Their resources built trusted relationships with our people and delivered in key areas such as testing and conversion that got us back on track and live on our planned go-live date. We could not have gone live without them."

With the first month of operations in the books, the PeopleSoft-based GFS has provided increased operational compliance, improved processing and timely financial and project-based reporting to Edelman. Business and Project Managers are now empowered to proactively manage their portfolio of projects. Where time and expense compliance was a regular challenge in the field, the compliance level for on time submissions is now well over 90 percent per period. Most importantly, invoices were reviewed, approved and distributed month one. As noted by Vic Malanga, Global CFO of Edelman, "with the go-live of GFS throughout the US, we have been able to take a large step forward in our goals of deploying a common platform that supports proactive management, real-time intelligence and consistent business practices. Collaborative Solutions did an excellent job understanding our needs, meshing with our organization and helping us achieve our biggest successes yet as we deploy GFS globally."

Going forward, the project team has focused on continuous improvement of GFS for both the field and operational users. Collaborative Solutions is currently assisting Edelman in the planning for and deployment of GFS throughout Europe and other global locations.