The Bottom Line
The Bottom Line is Fusion5's customer newsletter - but it's not just ANY newsletter! Every 8 weeks or so we'll be dropping hints, tips, insights, and more to your Inbox, that are all about you. Or, more accurately, all about helping, inspiring, and empowering you.
As for 'Who is Fusion5', let us show you in a video.
That’s probably why Microsoft Teams has been a source of great delight for me over the last few years. It's enabled our business to deliver projects seamlessly despite the pandemic, and for me, as CEO, to maintain an ongoing dialogue with our people and clients - no matter where they are.
As we all adapted to remote working for long periods, I admit to being worried about the impact of the disruption on the business. It was a genuine concern, which I am sure was widely shared – and without Teams, I am sure the outcome would have been different for many of us in the services industry. As it was, Teams meant that we didn’t miss a beat – nothing has changed.
Our relationships have continued. We've seen each other, talked, laughed, and even learned more about one another’s lives, pets, and families. It’s been very much business as usual, if not better in some ways. For example, when we had our first face-to-face director’s meeting in Queenstown late last year, it was as though we hadn’t seen one another in person for weeks – not the 30 months it was in reality. It was amazing to maintain that degree of comfort and familiarity; it was as if two and a half years of remote relationships hadn't happened.
Although I had begrudgingly used Skype in the years past, Teams has proven to be so much more – more powerful, reliable, and collaborative. So, it's no surprise to me that Teams saw a huge increase in users over the pandemic (rising from 20 million users in November 2019 to a staggering 270 million in 2022!).
Teams has allowed me to replace an inability to travel over the last few years with the ability to contact someone quickly, to chat or conduct business. To see someone's face, see if they're happy, see if they're engaged and talk to them as though they’re in the same room, has been worth its weight in gold.
While the rest of Fusion5’s leadership team may talk about newer and more strategic technology, I’ll admit that Teams, this year - and the three prior - gets my vote. It has been my lifesaver.
Rebecca Tohill
CEO - Fusion5
As Fusion5’s GM People & Performance, 2023 is the year which will make me wonder why we did things the hard way for so long.
Like most fast-growing businesses, Fusion5 cut its teeth on largely hands-on people processes and has hung on to them longer than practical (which is a bit brave to admit as a business technology partner). But by the end of 2022, it was time to acknowledge our need to move on from the roadblocks and inefficiencies created by a reliance on emails, Word templates and forms, spreadsheets, and complex manual workflows.
It was clear that what worked for us when we had a team of a few hundred was no longer sustainable. We needed to be nimble, efficient, responsive, and employee-focused in a highly competitive market. With a 2023 headcount of 650+ employees across New Zealand and Australia, we were ready to transform.
This all leads to the technology that will impact my role most this year - a service management platform called 4me.
Even though it’s early in the year, 4me has already proven a real game-changer for me, my team, our people, and the business. And we’re not even fully utilising it yet – more developments are afoot.
It’s enabling us to streamline our people processes - from recruitment to onboarding, offboarding, and producing every variation of actual and what-if reporting in between. We’ve already eliminated old dependencies on any one person – so staff illness or leave no longer stops the wheels from turning. The self-service portal offers a wide range of services to our employees and management. And we can now generate detailed board-level reporting and analytics on manager requests for more headcount so our leadership team can evaluate the financial and operational impact on the business. Now, once a request to recruit has all the necessary approvals, it enters an automated workflow which triggers HR into action.
Thankfully, we no longer need to contend with the massive email overload generated by employee administration actions and HR activities. All HR requests now enter a single queue, so if I’m not around to action something, my team can keep things moving – from proceeding with a recruitment campaign to organising flowers for a staff member to issuing hardware.
Now, while always busy, I’m no longer indispensable, and that’s fine with me. I have more plans in place for 2023 and more time to make them happen.
Stephanie Moore
General Manager People & Performance
I can’t, in all honesty, claim that any single application will significantly impact me in 2023. By itself, that is.
But when you add the magic of streamlined processes and an expanded data net, the impact on my role as CRO is immediately amplified.
Why? As chief revenue officer (CRO) for Fusion5, I’m responsible for our revenue generation processes. I’m accountable to the rest of the business for driving better integration and alignment between all our revenue-related functions – this includes marketing, sales, customer support, pricing, and revenue management.
We’re upgrading our CRM to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE this year. And while that’s exciting, it’s our commitment to data – how we use and store it – that will add superpowers to our CRM. Likewise, with our use of Workday Adaptive Planning.
Over 2022, we looked closely at how our data strategy served us. And as a result, we decided to overhaul it. We’re now building a data lake to consolidate and structure information across all our systems. It will impact not only my role but those of the sales and account management roles that I influence as CRO, as well as provide visibility of trends around delivery and utilisation to our professional services teams.
We plan to change the data we have around our operational performance and budgeting and make it much more accessible. We’ll be able to slice and dice it and generate those real-time metrics and reports needed to successfully run a real-time business – but on steroids.
For me, that means we can do some really interesting and powerful analysis of growth trends and opportunities, our lines of revenue, the ratios between different teams, profit ratios and headcount to billing ratios – and more. This will all shine a light on how and where we can become more efficient, and maximise the value we drive from the time and effort we put in.
Having access to the data which allows us to track trends on a weekly basis and influence change is of significant business value – and it was something we couldn’t realistically achieve by collating data manually. Now, with data accessible and ready in 'real time', the insights we used to apply monthly can be brought into weekly conversations so we can constantly tune and monitor where the business is heading. We can see the impact of the changes and tweak them four times a month rather than 12 times a year.
Up until now, we’ve had that information, but had to rely on a vast array of spreadsheets to consolidate the information we need to make decisions. Most of you will appreciate the time it takes to consolidate data and manipulate it into a meaningful and usable format using Excel and keep it up to date. (And as I’m known for running, not walking, it’s been extremely frustrating.)
By transforming how we store, use, and access our data, we’ve got a baseline of metrics to measure our performance against and then record deviations. And it will allow us to add significant value to how we operate each department.
I’ll have consolidated and automated budget reporting, and a centralised version of the truth. We’ll be able to easily map our actuals to capture those variations and produce real-time statistics. With instant access to trends and performance variations, I’ll be able to keep my finger on the pulse of the business – and our P&L performance - day in, day out.
Our commitment to our data is going to revolutionise my job. For good.
Sven Martin
Executive Director and Chief Revenue Officer
Fusion5 started using Workday Adaptive Planning in 2022 to leverage the financial information and capabilities we already had in our NetSuite ERP to run our annual budgets. This year however, we're really ramping up how we use Workday – it's already been a game-changer for me as CFO and the business, and we’re looking to expand that further.
But first - what couldn’t we do before Workday?
Fusion5 is a well-established group of companies operating across New Zealand and Australia, yet, just twelve months ago, producing clear and concise consolidated financial statements for our Board directly from our ERP was a cumbersome task. Workday changed that almost immediately with easy-to-use integrated tools such as the Microsoft Office OfficeConnect add-on which allowed me (yes, me!) to quickly produce and customise Excel reports or presentations for the directors using up-to-date financial data imported from our ERP – without the need for time-consuming customisations to existing report formats, or passing it off to technical report writing staff.
This year we’re going to be expanding what we can do (big-time) by using Workday as a key reporting tool to deliver financial results and targeted business metrics to our front-line managers.
As CFO, the next big value-add for me is the ability to use Workday to generate real-time rolling forecasts based on current performance scenarios rather than assumptions we made and budgets we set six months ago, without going through the full budget review process. Rolling forecasts from Workday will provide us with a better financial picture by combining actual trends and trading results with “what-if” variables to forecast future performance – which is critical to every business’s success, especially when expecting periods of uncertainty.
As CFO of Fusion5, it's exciting to leverage all the power and value of the information we've got in our financial system. Workday is user-friendly, making it easy to use and quickly gain value from. I can write reports without needing a team of analysts to support me, and in turn produce information for our directors and decision-makers that meet their individual presentation style and preferences. With Workday, we’re able to accommodate this with minimal effort and maximum satisfaction.
Workday's been a breath of fresh air and has vastly improved our up-to-the-minute reporting capabilities, winning kudos around the boardroom table. With Workday, we can make better-informed decisions about ‘what next’, ‘what if,’ and ‘where to from here’.
In a year which promises to be very challenging for the economy, businesses, and individuals alike, real-time financial information and analysis coupled with accurate rolling forecasts could make the difference between surviving and succeeding – and Workday is a powerful tool to have in the arsenal.
Greg Marshall
CFO - Fusion5
2023 is going to be the year of better monitoring and response services! And that’s not only going to transform my ability to utilise my resources on a day-to-day basis but, more importantly, streamline what we deliver to our customers.
We've used PagerDuty, an acclaimed incident response platform, for the last few years. This year, however, we’re doing an extensive overhaul (think complete from scratch reimplementation) as we look to extend the use of Event Intelligence and automation.
We already love PagerDuty (as do our customers). It’s a truly modern solution that ingests all sorts of logs and monitoring across any number of different sources. Then, it takes all those alerts, metrics, and endpoints and brings them together into a single visibility pane. So, you have complete real-time view of every possible issue within your environment. And if you’re out-of-office, you won't miss a thing as it pushes out instant notifications to the incident responders and phones them if there’s a critical problem (because cybercrime and system outages never sleep).
Until now, a lot of the work that our managed services team does involves investigating live alerts for our service subscribers and responding appropriately. Due to the complexity of some of the environments we support, this can often be a manually intensive task. Leveraging the latest functionality in PagerDuty, we’ll be moving from a more reactive manual process to a fully automated system, so we can configure hands-off workflows to spring into action if there’s an alert from a particular asset or device. In addition, the command to address the issues is automated as much as possible – like fixing services that have gone offline with a restart or another basic function.
Why does this make me happy? The new PagerDuty automation and workflow functionality is very powerful. The turnaround time to address customer issues will be significantly reduced because we won’t need to log in, assess, and process every issue alert by hand. And we’ll also end up with valuable information about the types of issues occurring at any given time so we can take a more proactive, streamlined approach to managing them.
While we already use a lot of automation to deliver managed services, this will take it to another level. We’ll be able to leverage AI to reduce systems outages by learning the type of events happening and when, and produce trends analysis we can use to address and improve the impact on customers’ environments. It will give customers more stability and free up our engineers to invest more time in proactive work with continual improvement across health checks, assessments, and more.
The new functionality in PagerDuty will speed up our response time and potentially reduce the ongoing costs to our customers. It will make my role easier, knowing that we’re doing more for you – more efficiently - and freeing up the resources I need to drive continuous improvement.
Kris Jackson
General Manager Enterprise Cloud & Security
For the Data, Risk & Governance Leaders
You’ve probably seen all the news headlines about ChatGPT – invented by OpenChat and backed by Microsoft, it’s simply the hottest AI language model chatbot out there. And seriously, watch this space – it will quickly and completely disrupt so many things for so many.
ChatGPT has incredible practical potential for businesses, and it will transform my role at Fusion5 as ANZ Practice Manager Data and Analytics in 2023. After my recent introduction to it through Microsoft, I was so impressed and excited that I stayed up (very, very) late to play with it.
As I played with ChatGPT deep into the night and early morning, I put it to the test on some real-life scenarios:
So, how is it going to change my role in 2023?
Data strategy is a significant part of what I do. To establish customer data goals and vision, we send out a survey with open-ended questions. I asked ChatGPT what else we should add, and within seconds it provided a list of relevant, value-adding questions. (We’ll also use the chatbot to analyse their responses and generate an accurate synopsis). ChatGPT can easily and rapidly ingest documents of significant length for breakfast – and spit out accurate summaries of critical points within minutes. It can even further summarise the summaries into well-articulated, bite-sized content.
The potential of ChatGPT is astounding – and there is so much more that it can do, right down to writing seamless Python code. I'm not saying we won't carefully review what ChatGPT does, but the time it saves will allow me (and my team) to add more value to our customers' data strategies. The bottom line is that it will revolutionise everything we do – every company and every person. So I’m more than happy to be counted as being on the ChatGPT bandwagon.
Wouter de Vos
ANZ Practice Manager Data and Analytics
This edition we asked Microsoft Country Manager (Australia), Craig Westcott, and Executive Director - NetSuite & Corporate Performance Management, Grant Robertson, about: The history of Enterprise Resource Planning; what's really so great about having all your data in one place; whether an RFP is still the best way to select an ERP; and what are the most important considerations when choosing the next 'central nervous system' for your business.
00:40 Where did ERP come from, and what did it set out to do?
02:00 Why Grant gets passionate when people get 'fluffy' about ERP!
03:55 What's so great about having all your data in one place?
05:28 How do you decide which is the right ERP for you?
06:44 Why do you think using an RFP to choose an ERP is a flawed process?
07:35 What would we tell a friend if they asked "How do I choose an ERP?"
09:52 Where do 'hearts and minds' come into the ERP selection process?
10:35 What are the risks of choosing an ERP in isolation from the rest of your business?
11:20 If an RFP process isn't the final word on how to choose an ERP, what's the alternative?
11:41 What does a good implementation partner look like?
13:32 Microsoft vs Oracle - who's the best for ERP?
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