Below are a selection of case studies that illustrate some of the ways that The Huguelet Group has delivered value to its clients. To learn more about one of them, or to discuss a case study in your industry, please contact us at 866.HUGUELET (866.484.8353).

Managing a Fortune 500 Data Center Move

	Client: A Fortune 500 quick service restaurant company.
	Situation: The client was consolidating and moving its outsourced data centers to a new, single provider and needed assistance coordinating the migration process with the hosting providers and various hardware manufacturers, as well as working with internal business teams to ensure a smooth migration with minimal operational impact. The systems that were moving included a mission-critical supply chain management application.
	Services Provided: The Huguelet Group provided extensive project management across ten production applications and an extensive shared network and storage area network (SAN) infrastructure. In addition, The Huguelet Group’s consultants worked with application owners and enterprise architects to develop creative strategies and techniques to implement the migration in a phased manner while managing costs and minimizing the impact to application users.
	Outcome: The migration was executed smoothly with no damage to any of the systems. The mission-critical SCM application was re-initialized and running significantly ahead of schedule.

Creating a Global Enterprise Architecture Roadmap

	Client: A Fortune 500 company.
	Situation: To advance its efforts to foster a more cohesive enterprise architecture, the client needed to create a set of global technology standards that could be used in various countries across all I.T. functions that would provide a technology “roadmap”. This roadmap would assist them when purchasing or developing applications as well as when implementing new infrastructure technologies. Prior to the engagement, these standards were not well documented and often could only be understood by consulting with one of a small number of perennially-overworked enterprise architects.
	Services Provided: The Huguelet Group worked with key stakeholders in the enterprise to enumerate and shape standards in the areas of networking, servers/desktops, security, data, and integration and have them published in a single, easy-to-reference document.
	Outcome: This “enterprise architecture roadmap” document became the standard reference for questions related to technology standards arose. It also provided an objective “litmus test” that various technology initiatives could be measured against to determine their alignment with the company’s global standards and what, if any, architectural variances needed to be approved.

Strategy for Gathering Information from Business Partners

	Client: A middle market manufacturer and distributor.
	Situation: Over the previous five years, the client’s growth strategy had shifted the majority of its sales from direct channels to indirect channels—namely, a set of approximately 50 distributors. Although this had accelerated the client’s growth dramatically, it no longer had direct knowledge of many of its end customers. Such insights were deemed critical to making effectively strategic and tactical business decisions, and the client wanted an automated way to gather this information from its distributors.
	Services Provided: The Huguelet Group worked with senior sales, program, and marketing management to create a strategy, architecture, and cost estimate for collecting sales information from the distributors. To determine the feasibility of the approach, a survey of the I.T. capabilities of the distributors was also conducted by The Huguelet Group.
	Outcome: The costs necessary to implement the automated data collection strategy were more significant than the client had originally anticipated. Further, the I.T. capabilities survey of the client’s distributors revealed that most would not be able to readily supply the necessary data and would therefore likely create a significant additional operational burden for the client company. Based upon these insights, the initiative to collect this data was wisely cancelled and the client instead decided to use the data gathered by way of its remaining direct sales to make its decisions.

	Client: A Fortune 500 company.
	Situation: The client was undertaking one of the largest implementations of Oracle 11i ERP software in the world. Its strategic direction was to host the server infrastructure for such projects externally, so a technically-savvy project manager was needed to coordinate the purchase, delivery, installation, and on-going operations and maintenance of the required server and storage infrastructures that needed to be implemented between two different hosting providers across independent development, staging, and production environments.
	Services Provided: The Huguelet Group’s project manager coordinated all work aspects related to the nearly 200 enterprise-class servers and SANs necessary to support the deployment project. His duties were wide-ranging and involved creating work plans, tracking issues, gathering technical requirements, architecting solutions, ordering and installing, and implementing operating procedures. These duties required him to serve as a liaison between the hosting providers, the project team, and various groups within the client’s information technology function over a duration of 18 months.
	Outcome: Under extremely aggressive timelines, all of the necessary server and storage infrastructures were successfully implemented and operationalized so that the project team of 500 could accomplish its deployment responsibilities. This was accomplished despite one of the hosting providers going bankrupt and subsequently being sold during the course of the engagement.

Integrating Multiple Point of Sale (POS) Systems into a National Payment Network

	Client: A global petroleum refiner, marketer, and retailer.
	Situation: In order to achieve Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance, the client needed to upgrade or replace the POS systems in approximately 10,000 of its franchised retail locations. The client wanted to use this opportunity to also implement a new retail site architecture that would permanently separate the connectivity to its national electronic payment processing network from the POS systems. In addition to upgrading two legacy “preferred” POS systems to this new architecture, the client also wanted to integrate seven additional POS systems to provide its “jobber” franchisees with a wider range of POS options to meet their diverse needs—while still maintaining consistent connectivity to its payment network.
	Services Provided: The Huguelet Group provided project management oversight to facilitate seven independent software companies integrating their POS systems with the Electronic Payment Server (EPS) device. While the software companies were ultimately responsible for the completing the integration, The Huguelet Group’s consultant guided the vendors through their design, development, testing, and Pilot phases—serving as the day-to-day liaison between the vendors and the client’s program, business, and I.T. teams.
	Outcome: All seven POS vendors have successfully completed their integration efforts and are being deployed to the client’s franchisees today.

Aligning Applications with an Enterprise Architecture

	Client: A Fortune 500 quick service restaurant company.
	Situation: As part of its process to align new applications with its enterprise technology standards, this client’s enterprise architecture group was tasked to review each new application and infrastructure prior to implementation. Given the large size of the client and the relatively small number of enterprise architects, there was often a backlog of applications waiting to be assessed.
	Services Provided: The Huguelet Group provided an experienced architect which worked in tandem with the client’s enterprise architecture group to review numerous initiatives and prepare necessary architecture variances.
	Outcome: Lead times for architecture reviews were decreased, leading to faster application delivery and an increase in architectural compliance.

Creating a Software Product Roadmap

	Client: A start-up spend intelligence software product company.
	Situation: This client had already developed a revolutionary software product and had its initial customer, but was now looking to move beyond its initial sale by focusing its product development, marketing, and sales efforts.
	Services Provided: The Huguelet Group provided product management expertise and created a software product roadmap that created distinct product offerings (including purchased, hosted/ASP, and “gainshare” revenue models) with associated pricing, ROI, and benefits definitions. In addition, The Huguelet Group’s consultant also augmented the client’s sales force by leading customer demonstrations and presentation.
	Outcome: Subsequent to The Huguelet Group’s engagement, the client received a substantial round of angel financing to accelerate its growth and in 2006 was successfully sold to an industry-leading firm.

Managing Business Operations at a Software Start-Up

	Client: A start-up financial services software product company.
	Situation: The client was beginning operations of its company and had secured an initial customer to invest in the development of their software product. To support the growth of the business and allow the founders to focus on product design and development, an additional executive was required to manage the establishment of day-to-day operations.
	Services Provided: The Huguelet Group provided a consultant with experience in the initial stages of starting a company as well as software product development. This executive worked to operationalize the business by performing activities such as developing financial forecasts and cash flow models, securing business insurance, obtaining employee insurance and benefits, and identifying office space. In addition, this consultant was also involved in the design and architecture of the software product, as well as creating the product roadmap document.
	Outcome: The business was successfully operationalized, allowing the CEO (a former COO) and CTO to focus their time and efforts.