“I have run 5 new system deployments across finance and HR systems previously and this was head and shoulders above the rest”.
Bridewell is a cyber security consultancy business with offices across the UK and now with presence in the USA.
The company celebrated their 10th anniversary this year and is one of the fastest growing cyber businesses in the UK, experiencing 50% year-on-year growth.
Bridewell currently has 200 employees and counting, with an equal number of customers, and up to 250 active projects running at any given time, with ambitions to continue growing in the UK and abroad.
Bridewell had a patchwork of disparate systems that couldn’t integrate or communicate with each other, which was wasting valuable time and putting an artificial ceiling on their ambitions.
As CFO Ruth Billen recalls:
“When I joined 12 months ago, the business was well run, but it had a lot of systems. There were separate systems for finance, expenses, and HR. The key platform within the business was Salesforce, but nothing else could talk to it”.
With all these different systems, a lot of data had to be handled manually. This meant they were slower to react and had limited trust in that data because of the number of hands and systems it had to pass through.
“We had a lot of spreadsheets, and a lot of emails being sent around with data and reports in them, instead of having that data at our fingertips.”
For a business that sees utilisation as a key metric, making sure that the right people are working on the right projects at the right times is what drives revenue. Yet they simply did not have the right level of visibility to ensure that people and resources were being utilised correctly.
“We had a lot of spreadsheets, and a lot of emails being sent around with data and reports in them, instead of having that data at our fingertips.”
Ruth Billen, CFO, Bridewell
Bridewell needed a single solution – a single source of truth. They needed to take all the data flowing through multiple different systems and house it in one place, where it could be trusted and easily accessed.
Salesforce has been the foundation, with their other systems needing to be built around it.
Working with both xcd and Certinia, Bridewell have implemented solutions that seamlessly integrate with each other and the Salesforce platform, bringing all their business-critical processes into one place.
From xcd they have implemented Core HR, performance management, and expenses. This has been combined with a full deployment from Certinia for professional services automation, transforming the way that they manage resources, data, and their people.
Partnering with both xcd and Certinia to bolster their single-platform strategy has been a smooth process, helping Bridewell move towards greater efficiency, transparency, and growth, as Ruth Billen admitted:
“I have run 5 new system deployments across finance and HR systems previously and this was head and shoulders above the rest”.
With their HR and finance teams no longer spending all their time trying to reconcile data from multiple systems, they now can add significant value, with their time instead able to go towards analysing that data and using it to make better decisions for the business.
“A single source of truth is critical. Having a platform that you can use – that everyone can use – means that you can make the right business decisions based on the right data.”
Again, with utilisation being central to everything they do, they now have a single platform that can help them manage capacity, and gain visibility of how and where their time, resources, and people are being used.
Whereas before, the HR team needed to pull holiday data from one system and input it manually into their resource management system – a task that risked human error impacting the process – now they have an integrated single solution that allows them complete visibility:
“We can make sure that people aren’t taking too much time off, or not taking enough time which could then become a problem later in the year. We can always make sure we have enough capacity for our projects and that’s critical to keeping our customers happy.”
With a ‘war for talent’ raging on in their sector, having an HR solution on Salesforce has also potential to boost their retention efforts. Bridewell can make sure that their people are getting the right opportunities to work on interesting projects and grow in their careers:
“That comes from managing our sales pipeline – what Salesforce was originally put in for.”
Bridewell has complete visibility of the projects coming up, the capacity within their teams, and can link that to the performance development targets set during performance reviews. They have much more visibility and can react much more quickly than before to make the right decisions for their business and their people. This allows them to grow their Employee Value Proposition and ensure they’re using their talent most effectively.
Most critically, Bridewell knows that they now have a solution in place that is going to help drive their continued growth. The rapid pace at which they’ve grown meant that they needed a solution that could grow with them.
Ruth Billen
Ruth Billen
CFO at Bridewell
CFO at Bridewell
