2006 VARs of the Year

"That which is measured gets done," says Scott Jenkins, managing partner at Lenexa, Kan.-based The EBS Group. That mantra and a month-and-a-half of extensive talks with his customer is what won the company this year's VAR of the Year award in the Value To Customer category.

The customer, Burns & McDonnell, is an engineering, construction and environmental and consulting services firm with more than 20 offices nationwide and greater than 1,600 employees. It was in desperate need of a role-based employee business-intelligence portal for information across multiple back-end systems to be efficiently circulated and stored.

Jenkins and his team took the customer's needs to heart and held interviews with more than 50 of Burns & McDonnell's high-level managers. "We wanted to gather all of their pains around improving employee productivity and the data that would be important to being able to do work more effectively," Jenkins says. Some of these bottlenecks included content slowed by large e-mail transmissions or printed reports that weren't easily consumable.

The EBS Group ultimately delivered an Oracle Fusion middleware solution. The end result centered around Oracle Portal, Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer platform and Oracle Collaboration Suite. The solution provides single sign-on; role-based access to data integrated from systems such as Oracle Financials, Human Resources and Projects; and business content from knowledge repositories. The data warehouse and views for each role and function were then applied.

The first phase of the project addressed the project-management teams, which is where the money comes from. "They need the information and data presented to them in key performance metrics rolled up to them as red, green and yellow," Jenkins explains. This measurement through color coding is vital to seeing which projects are going along well (green), might need some attention (yellow) or need immediate attention (red) in some form or another. The project-manager phase was successfully launched this past summer on time and on budget, while another 30 role-based initiatives will be launched all the way down the line to cover all business areas.

--Cristina McEachern

NEXT: VAR of the Year for New Ventures