To our clients and friends:I hope you all are finding time to enjoy the summer with family and friends. Having just returned from vacation, I am reminded of how important it is to recharge the battery every once in awhile!! I want to start by mentioning a few of the great things that have happened at West Monroe Partners over the past two months. West Monroe Partners forms a new utilities-focused practice.
To confront their changing regulatory environment, many U.S. utilities are beginning to look seriously at Smart Grid and Advanced Metering Infrastructure projects. West Monroe Partners has done some exciting work in this space recently, and as a result we are creating a new utility industry-focused team. Tom Hulsebosch, president and founder of Strategy 2 Solution, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in working with utilities to apply wireless communication solutions, is joining West Monroe Partners this month as a managing director and to lead this area of focus for us. Microsoft recognizes our SharePoint credentials and marketing drive.
In July, we received the Microsoft Midwest Area Partner “Compete to Win” Award—one of nine awards presented quarterly to recognize the achievements of its partners in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. West Monroe Partners, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, recently developed a proprietary, consumer-oriented document management application utilizing SharePoint as the technology platform—one of the first such applications of SharePoint! This project showcased our ability to bring together infrastructure, integration, user-centric design, and knowledge management expertise to create a compelling solution. West Monroe Partners is again among the “Best and Brightest.”
For the third consecutive year, West Monroe Partners was named to the list of “Chicago’s 101 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For” by the National Association for Business Resources. While I am proud of the recognition, it is more important to me that we are not coasting on our reputation in this area. I’m even more proud of our efforts to listen and to continuously foster an environment where people can achieve their potential and be great at what they do. Welcome to our 2008 recruiting class.
As we grow our team, our focus is on adding and developing new college graduates—the people who represent the future of our firm. We take great care to find the right individuals on campus and to ensure that they are a good fit with our culture and values. I’m pleased to welcome our 2008 recruiting class of 21 new college graduates who have joined West Monroe Partners during the summer from schools such as DePauw University, University of Illinois, University of Washington, and Miami University (Ohio). In this month’s newsletter, we offer up some thoughts on a few issues with which many of our clients are wrestling. - Strategies for optimizing product delivery costs, including five steps that distribution-intensive companies can take to make sure they are getting the most from every dollar spent on labor
- Virtual shared services arrangements, which offer organizations new opportunities to reduce costs, improve employee quality of life, and mitigate risks
- Energy Trading Risk Management (ETRM) software solutions, which are helping firms that buy or sell energy commodities manage a growing set of physical and regulatory risks
We welcome your feedback, questions, and ideas for future newsletter topics. In this issue:
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