Inplenion
The Architects Of Business Performance Excellence

We have all heard about the parable, “The Elephant and the Six Blind Men,” at some point in our lives. It is a story of a group of blind men who try to describe an elephant for the first time by touching it. One man holds the elephant’s trunk and thinks it is like a snake. Another touches the elephant’s leg and thinks it resembles a tree’s trunk. And as the other men started feeling different body parts of the elephant (like tail, ears, torso, and tusk), they inferred that the animal looks like a rope, a huge fan, a solid wall, and a spear.

This anecdote perfectly communicates the necessity of an all-inclusive view of a situation for putting the big picture together. Had their sight not been limited, the blind men could easily see that the elephant is a collection of all the characteristics they individually experienced. Now, as digitalisation has taken the world by storm, this parable resonates very strongly with the business realm today.

Over the past few decades, the business world has entered an era where organisational teams with certain specialisations are the linchpin of success and competency. Even though specialisation has its apparent benefits, overdoing it can often lead to losing sight of the bigger picture. Without an end-to-end view of their business requirements, the siloed teams often fail to see the power of collaboration to overcome organisational hurdles. For example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) is frequently presumed as the skeleton key to unlock many organisational roadblocks. Nevertheless, it is just one critical component of the extensive digital overhaul. There is a growing requirement for sound financial planning & forecasting that businesses need to take into account along with additional data analytics tools beyond just a handful of specialised ERP modules. Only then can companies recognise products and services that are creating value. This also helps in early identification of the market segments and technologies to invest in or divest, leading to optimised business performance and, eventually, organisational accomplishment. To stay abreast of the changing landscape, businesses need an experienced advisor who can help them remain focused on their ‘big picture’ and connect all the business processes instead of implementing just another ERP solution. Rising to the critical challenges of a digital makeover, Inplenion—a platinum partner of Oracle NetSuite— delivers comprehensive ERP services to aid not only in a business’ digital transformation but also its long-term success.“We are the key to the digitalisation of operations and management excellence,” comments Jann Tadorian, the founder and CEO of Inplenion.

The Roadblocks for SMBs and Legacy Enterprises

SMBs and legacy companies both come with their unique set of challenges.

For legacy organisations, their monolithic infrastructure hampers the adoption of new technological innovations. Such long-established companies find it challenging to derive the right quality of data from a complex, outdated business environment. Besides, they also face hurdles around change management. And when it comes to SMBs, they require a holistic ERP platform that connects all the departments together and reports the right KPIs for budget planning and forecasting beyond the traditional ERP functionalities to increase profitability.

Rising to the Challenges of Digitalisation

Tadorian, as an industry veteran, has witnessed firsthand the problems of SMBs and legacy companies in implementing the right ERP and Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) framework. He notes that due to the lack of end-to-end visibility, these organisations go through complicated, convoluted, and time-consuming digitalisation processes. Observing this common blindside across different organisations, Tadorian was driven to find a solution. The result was Inplenion, the global architect of business performance excellence for both SMBs and legacy organisations. With its track record of many successful ERP and FP&A project implementations in the last years, the company has single-handedly helped businesses connect all the functional components of their day-to-day operations, from finance to IT and procurement teams all the way through to the supply chain.

Inplenion creates a performance-driven framework for its clients to leverage ERP solutions that incorporate best practices and standardised operations across the enterprise, minimising closing times while providing timely insights to key stakeholders. Inplenion enables quick adoption of world-class financial planning and budgeting across lines of businesses with flexible and customizable deployment options by leveraging Oracle NetSuite Planning and Budgeting module.

One Singular Approach: The Pizza Approach / Inplenion Implementation Accelerators

To help SMBs and large businesses implement a successful digital strategy, Inplenion takes a systematic approach that Tadorian refers to as ‘The Pizza Approach.’ In a close parallel to how a customer can select the preferred base and toppings for their pizza, Inplenion helps its clients navigate through their transformation journey while achieving superior performance optimisation and process management. Similar to the base of a pizza, Inplenion’s approach offers a baseline of essential applications that feature the necessary functionalities of ERP and FP&A tools. Once the foundation is laid, clients can opt for additional functionalities according to their requirements from Inplenion’s extensive offerings.

“Clients can then choose to include various other applications distributed across ‘level 1’ to ‘level 3’ in a manner akin to how toppings are added on a pizza according to consumer preferences,” explains Tadorian.

This composable implementation accelerator approach enables clients to have complete control over the features that they need, and at the same time, remain within their budget. While the Inplenion Accelerators are designed keeping small to midsized companies in mind so that they can continue to add more functionality as the need arises, it also helps large organisations to manage their process changes in smaller chunks. The ease of implementation of such an incremental approach has seen high demand in different countries where Inplenion is currently active.

"We come from the corporate finance world, and now we have the base of the transactional world added to our experience, giving us end-to-end expertise, from the operations to managerial decisions"

Standing Tall among Competitors

According to Tadorian, the end-to-end visibility of business processes that Inplenion offers stems from its experience in the planning and budgeting / FP&A side of NetSuite ERP solutions. For traditional NetSuite partners, it takes a considerable amount of time to get into the FP&A aspect of the ERP solution, as the Oracle planning and budgeting solution was only recently restructured within NetSuite. Inplenion, on the other hand, comes with years of expertise in implementing Oracle FP&A applications in all industries. “We come from the corporate finance world, and now we have the base of the transactional world added to our experience, giving us end-to-end expertise, from the operations to managerial decisions,” highlights Tadorian.

Foraying into the Future

With the growing demand for NetSuite planning and budgeting, Inplenion’s Implementation Accelerators have already attracted the attention of many organisations looking to implement NetSuite. Inplenion now aims to further expand its geographic reach worldwide, focusing on the EMEA region. Cutting through a multitude of diverse jurisdictions of different countries that it is currently operating in, Inplenion plans to combine the power of both onshore and localised offshore hubs. Comparing these offshore hubs with ‘pizzamaker kitchens,’ Tadorian quips, “We are considering building a localised factory where our clients can locally develop their pizza with all the necessary toppings. Once the specifications are taken into consideration, we will build it from our central ‘kitchen.’” Notably, Inplenion has already started providing its localised services for the UK market, with the German and Swiss market in the pipeline. According to Tadorian, these offshore hubs will be especially beneficial for SMBs as the ability to deliver the required solution in the shortest time is the master key to unlocking the success for SMBs.