Software company IT due-diligence

This company was well established in the industry in which it competes. It makes numerous software solutions which help its customers to bring their products to market amid a daunting landscape of government regulations and virtual paperwork. As the regulations change, and as the customer base grows, the company must adapt and scale accordingly.

Fortunately, the company’s internal software offerings, and the process it employed to develop them, were largely sufficient. Ensunet did discover that the company was performing its regression testing manually, so this was a bottleneck that needed to be addressed.

Far bigger than that, however, was the way the company was keeping its books. It relied on three different ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, including QuickBooks (which was way too “small” for a PE-owned entity), and manual entry into Excel (which was way too slow, and error-prone, for their mission).

Indeed, there was a decided lack of visibility into transactions and annual recurring revenue. And the monthly close-and-reconcile process for doing the books consumed approximately 21 days of each month.

For the manual regression-testing, Ensunet recommended an automated system to speed the process.

For the ERP dilemma, we recommended that all of the systems and data be consolidated to the top-performing one which they already had in place. We further recommended that they automate the monthly close and reporting process. The automation will effectively eliminate manual data-entry mistakes. It will also radically accelerate the process and streamline reporting. Closing the books will go from 21 days to just five days, month after month.

This will provide the company with stronger controls, improved reporting capability, and an increased ability to scale, making it a much better fit for the PE as a multi-location, investor-owned entity.

Ensunet provided the senior-level analyst for this project, who interfaced with the company’s CEO, the product leads, the infrastructure lead, and the market leads for the company’s American, European, and Asian markets. We conducted interviews with all of them; we also scrutinized their product demos and software development process.