Software purges paperwork pain

The mergers and acquisition group at Ernst & Young wants to change the way it does business.

The old way meant photocopying thousands of pages of documents and sending dozens of faxes and overnight-delivery packages just to keep the parties involved in a deal informed. "We used to shuffle a lot of paper," says John Auldridge, a partner at Ernst & Young in charge of the firm's Post-Deal Solutions Group.

The new way revolves around the Web, in conjunction with project-management software from Business Engine. Ernst & Young is implementing the company's Business Engine Network (BEN) software to help organize and track projects with its Post-Deal clients.

BEN is a suite of project-, resource- and budget-management applications. According to Gartner, Business Engine is one of several vendors with suites that combine service process optimization and professional services automation. Its competition includes other emerging vendors such as Niku, Novient, Changepoint and PlanView, as well as traditional project management vendors such as Primavera, Artemis and Microsoft, and enterprise resource planning players such as PeopleSoft, SAP and Oracle.

Ernst & Young selected Business Engine in October after evaluating a handful of vendors, the company says. Business Engine stood out because it offered communication tools and a document repository, Auldridge says.

And improving communication is key because that's what Ernst & Young set out to bolster.

When Ernst & Young takes on a merger or acquisition project, the firm's role is to streamline the process of integrating its clients' businesses - which covers everything from IT, human resources and payroll to marketing, manufacturing, and research and development. Outside consultants are typically included, such as a legal adviser retained by one of the companies.

Because parties are dispersed in several locations, there were delays getting information to everyone using Ernst & Young's manual processes, Auldridge says. Today, the Web-based BEN applications let Ernst &Young, its clients and third-party advisers share one workspace where they can immediately access the most up-to-date project information through a Web browser.

As a document repository, BEN includes version-control features that Ernst & Young needs for record keeping - a task that was hard to manage when information was exchanged through e-mail, fax and hard copies.

BEN also serves as an engine for tracking project workflow. Users can quickly see the status of each task in the acquisition process and monitor potential resource bottlenecks, Auldridge says.

Permissions-based security controls built into BEN let Ernst &Young segregate data and control what different users see. A high-level manager might be privy to all content, while an HR manager might see only personnel-related data, Auldridge says. Access controls also let Ernst &Young isolate data from the acquiring company and the target company, until regulatory guidelines allow it to be mingled.

The result is users share information more quickly, so parties can make faster decisions and close deals sooner, Auldridge says.

"It allows us to have better communication, and it allows us to take some of the risk out of what we do," he says.

So far Ernst & Young's Post-Deal team of about 30 people is using BEN for a few projects. The group plans to gradually expand its use to all mergers and acquisition projects, Auldridge says.

Ernst & Young chose to deploy BEN on its own premises; BEN runs on a server inside the firewall, and users input and access information through a Web interface. The setup is similar to a private extranet. Business Engine also offers a hosted service.

BEN was developed around Microsoft's BizTalk framework architecture and is .Net-compliant. It runs on Windows NT/2000 servers and supports Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle 8i databases.

Business Engine says its software lets companies operate 10% to 20% more efficiently; Ernst & Young didn't put a figure to its efficiency gains, but says the software already has paid for itself.