Almost twenty years ago, Randy Egger worked day and night to launch a company from his home office. As a one-man shop, he ran the business, acted as a global consultant, configured his database, and managed every other aspect—all without taking a salary for the first year. It was a risky move—Egger left his job at Oracle Corporation, where he had created an important suite of applications and developed unmatched expertise. But he was determined to succeed on his own, and knew he could leverage his intimate knowledge of Oracle and other applications to solve problems for companies in a new, better way.
The gamble paid off. Today, Egger’s company, Project Partners, LLC, is regarded as a leading source for project solutions. His collaborative team of former Oracle leaders has developed integrated products that extend the functionality of Oracle Projects, Oracle Primavera and NetSuite services resource planning applications. Together, they provide IT systems and business solutions for project-driven organizations, helping clients evolve their business by leveraging existing technologies.
“Most managers are making a lot of guesses when they could actually have the exact information they need to make better decisions, do their job faster, waste less time and money, and avoid mistakes.”
Typically, Project Partners works with customers in project-centric industries like construction, energy, government, IT management, engineering, telecommunications, transportation, and professional services. Across all sectors, Egger has noticed many companies making the same mistake. “Most firms want the systems to fit the way they currently do business,” he says. “Cost of ownership with any enterprise system is high, but customizations make it much more expensive. And the more customizations that you’ve made to the software, the greater the hurdle when upgrading to newer releases or making other changes to help your business evolve to meet market changes.” Instead, users should analyze if it would be smarter to use managed services and outsource as much as possible through cloud solutions and other models. Then, operations can adopt the best practices built into the software.
85
Customers per year
$1M
The highest single project value
350
Companies Project Partners has helped adopt
Enterprise Project Portfolio Management
65%
Reduction in invoicing labor at KCI Technologies because of Project Partners
75%
Reduction in reporting times at Colonial Pipeline because of Project Partners
95%
Reduction in pipeline production report time at Iberdrola Renewables because of Project Partners
These changes can be difficult for company leaders to accept, but Egger knows there’s a lot at stake for companies that remain slow to migrate to the cloud, reduce costs, and make systems easily accessible. “If a company doesn’t start on this road, they will find themselves out of business. The long-term cost savings of the cloud are going to make agile firms more cost-effective and cost-competitive, and therefore more successful,”
Egger says.
Project Partners urges every client to approach each business or tech problem in a new way, then steps in to help them evolve through applications and their own underlying technology. Instead of recreating the wheel with new and custom technology, companies can harness the potential of integrated systems and processes to make information flow between all pillars of their business. Project managers who have grown accustomed to using just one specific project management tool, for example, stand to benefit from accessing information about schedules, accounts, vendors,
and budgets. “Most managers are making a lot of
guesses when they could actually have the exact information they need to make better decisions, do their job faster, waste less time and money, and avoid mistakes,” Egger says.
When working with a client, a team at Project Partners analyzes that client’s behavior before suggesting a solution. Then, its tech leaders build rapid prototypes, solicit feedback, and build an integrated enterprise-wide solution. Speed is critical. “Companies need to be able to change rapidly to adapt to market changes, which means the technology needs to be able to change easily too,” Egger says. “You can’t have a five-year technology plan, because everything that you started with is going to be out of date and no longer a fit at the end of the five years if you follow the traditional on-premises approach.” Project Partners’s flexible approach keeps companies responsive. Salespeople can rely on updated, accurate information from other departments, and project managers can create exact schedules and costs long before they’re awarded a new job.
That’s why Egger left Oracle all those years ago–he wanted to be more than a technologist; he wanted to be a complete solution provider. Now he’s focusing less on products and more on solutions, which impresses his customers, and probably would impress his younger self, too, toiling away in a little home office.