Our Project Teams

CANDU

West Monroe Partners worked with this Toronto-based affiliation of nuclear power companies to migrate their extranet – COGonline -  to SharePoint 2007 in order to better serve their membership base’s needs.

The Project:

A Chicago-based team from West Monroe worked with CANDU’s Toronto  office to manage this project from beginning to end.  They began by identifying the pain points that members encountered when using COGonline, which yielded the need to improve site structure, enhance search capabilities, and streamline member access by enabling external user self-registration and log-in.

While the project was largely delivered virtually – only three face-to-face meetings occurred in the course of the project – the West Monroe team was able to develop very close personal relationships with the CANDU team.  In fact, CANDU’s president got so caught up in a shared hockey rivalry that he made a bet with the West Monroe team which would result in him wearing a Chicago Blackhawks jersey to his next board meeting if the project finished on time and on budget.  West Monroe lived up to their end of the bargain, he wore the shirt, and sent the team a Canadian Maple Leaf’s jersey to boot.

West Monroe’s combined focus on bringing great skills and expertise from good-to-work-with people resulted in a top-tier extranet that has received extremely positive feedback from across the organization’s vast membership base.  We’d love the opportunity to talk with you about meeting your critical project objectives in a similar way.

Hycor Biomedical

Hycor Biomedical is a life-science company based in Orange County, CA with additional facilities in the UK and the Netherlands. The company’s R&D and production operation focuses on allergy, autoimmune and urinanalysis tests used by clinical laboratories. West Monroe Partner’s mandate was two-fold:  perform an IT Due Diligence on the Hycor business as it existed as a division of Agilent Technologies and  subsequently, to carve-out Hycor from Agilent after successful acquisition by a private equity firm.  

The Project

Phase One: Hycor IT Due Diligence

West Monroe Partners was engaged by a Chicago based private equity firm to perform an IT Due Diligence for Hycor Biomedical. Our team evaluated the IT operations of Hycor through four lenses – Strategy & Financial, People, Process and Technology.  Our team identified significant technology spend implications that gave the private equity firm an advantageous platform from which to negotiate a discounted purchase price for the business. 

Phase Two: Hycor Carve Out

After the private equity firm bought Hycor from Agilent, the task remained to carve out Hycor and essentially stand it up as an independent business.  Separating a division from a larger parent is always a challenge and this phase of the project was no exception.  This phase required a strong breadth of technical expertise shared by our entire Private Equity and Alternative Investments team. We had to separate both the infrastructure and the applications that the infrastructure supported.  Within just a few short months this team was able to identify opportunities for technology improvements, prepare Hycor to operate as a stand-alone organization, and begin executing on requirements to transition Hycor to a standalone business entity.

The phase included creating a completely new IT infrastructure based on Microsoft’s technology stack (WAN, servers, desktop, security, remote connectivity, and data center), deploying and managing the conversion of applications (payroll, expense management,  ERPs, EDI, and Quality), and transitioning workplace services ( security and utilities). West Monroe’s expertise in Private Equity, business processes, systems management and IT allowed us to partner with our PE client and Hycor Biomedical to streamline the company’s transformation and ensure a successful transition.

West Monroe Partners developed a close relationship with the client, who trusted our recommendations and leadership to complete the project with success. The fact that the project was located in sunny southern California during winter was a bonus!

 

MB Financial

West Monroe Partners worked with this bank to design and introduce a new intranet portal, complete with collaborative team sites and document management capabilities.

The Project:

Over the course of six months, we rolled out the new intranet and document management site, complete with standardized page templates, version control, and collaborative team sites with document management standards.

Developing good working relationships—with each other and with our client colleagues—was a key to this project’s success. This meant we were able to express opinions freely and work through any issues effectively. But, it also translated into an overwhelming level of support for each other, and a level of collaboration that drove us to complete the many simultaneous initiatives that occurred during this project. Working together in our client’s conference room, we developed a real “open door” environment, even with some client employees who were not directly involved with the project. This project definitely felt like a partnership rather than a client-consultant relationship.

The survey feedback we received after the launch was very rewarding. Everyone was impressed with the new site, and we were able to address a good majority of the needs that the bank’s previous intranet site left unsatisfied. It was even more rewarding to see the incredible leap in employee productivity as the direct result of our work.

Takeda Global Research and Development

Takeda Global Research and Development (TGRD) was established in 2004 to support the clinical and product development activity for Takeda Pharmaceuticals.  The organization needed to templatize project plans across the organization in order to bring compounds in the pipeline through the development process consistently and efficiently.

The Project:

West Monroe Partner’s team was tasked with evolving a simple set of SharePoint template sites into a collaborative platform upon which trial and program-level teams could collaborate and expose data to executives in the group via an executive-level dashboard.  A robust security and integration mechanism allows key pieces of information from project plans to be displayed in line with documents, discussion boards, and rosters.  Additionally, the west Monroe team facilitated integration with an internal database that contains all project codes and data. 

With a continual emphasis on speed to market, West Monroe combined a “work hard/play hard” attitude into their interaction with Takeda.  The team celebrated a major milestone by getting dressed up in full auto-racing gear – jumpsuits, neck braces, and helmets – to have a high-speed go-cart race that pit team Takeda against team West Monroe. 

We’d love the opportunity to talk to you about how to speed up your achievement of critical business goals.  Contact us and start a conversation.

Canadian Commercial Corporation

West Monroe Partners implemented Agresso enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for the Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC), a Crown corporation of the Government of Canada that acts as the government’s international contracting and procurement agency.


The Project:

This project provided an excellent example of West Monroe Partners’ diverse areas of expertise—coordinated in a way that helped the client navigate a complex ERP implementation process. Our project team managed the critical process of defining new business processes that would be required to use the new system, and then worked closely with the executive team to ensure that all groups of users understood—and accepted—the new system, as well as new ways of working. In addition, we worked hard to ensure that the client’s data migrated accurately and completely from the old system to the new one.

Working with a multi-cultural, international team was challenging at times, but it was rewarding and excellent experience. Although we had many bridges to cross during the course of the project, in the end, we had an uneventful “go live.” That’s what our work is all about.

We also managed to have some fun while working on site—with team curling outings serving as our chief way of unwinding.