An enterprise application services leader with a customer-first focus: Apps Associates

Apps Associates is a premier enterprise application advisory services leader with a customer-first focus. For more than two decades decision makers have turned to Apps Associates for end-to-end strategic counsel, system integration and the services required to solve their most complex business and digital transformation challenges—applying expansive expertise in data and analytics, application modernization, automation, digital systems, operations, and change management. Apps Associates delivers a breadth of services, unwavering dependability and unparalleled agility that drives ROI. Apps Associates is a trusted partner for the management of critical business needs, providing strategic consulting and managed services for Oracle, Salesforce, integration, analytics and multi-cloud infrastructure.

Apps Associates was founded in 2002. It is a company acknowledged for its expertise, values, a history of innovation and a strong commitment to its customers and employees. Apps offers the breadth of services and scale to make a difference while always treating every customer with the attention that they deserve. Today, Apps has over 1350 employees with exceptional retention of both staff and clients. Apps was founded on the principle of partnership with customers based on trust, value, innovation, and continuous improvement. Apps differentiates through its relentless delivery excellence and customer care.

Advisory Services

Created to provide value and guidance before digital transformation gets underway, Apps partners with its customers on a broad range of advisory services. Counsel considers those just starting their journey that need assistance in collecting and documenting business requirements, or determining the right business systems for them to consider and evaluate. Others have already implemented a business system, but want to improve the experience for their business users. No matter where you are on your path to digital transformation, Apps can help make sense of the current situation and prepare a strategically aligned path forward—together—and help support your acceleration to the future state. Apps works with its customer’s teams to understand not only the pain points within current business processes, but also the future business requirements that must be met in order to efficiently achieve business goals. During this assessment, Apps will also review the current configurations of business systems and assess the implementation against best practice configurations that Apps sees across its portfolio.

Once the assessment stage is complete, Apps will offer solutions recommendations based on identified gaps and opportunities to address pain points impacting short and long-term planning goals. Depending on the maturity of the current business application stack, recommendations may range from identifying the right software to evaluate that meets the business needs, assessing a troubled implementation, or even areas where change management can increase user adoption. Apps can also assist with software selection services, including RFP creation, vendor identification, management of the RFP process, and scoring mechanisms to quantify business user feedback. With deep relationships across the system integrator community and multiple software platforms, Apps help customers find the right partner to assist with the implementation of the software and even support vendor negotiations to get the best price and contract terms possible.

Core Business Operations

At this stage of digital transformation, Global Design customers have typically selected a business systems software to implement, but need more nuance around how the software will specifically work to support the desired end outcome of the implementation—this is where Apps can help. Apps recommends that customers engage in a global design phase prior to the implementation. This step allows for a deep dive into the standard system functionality and business processes, to better understand system capabilities. Apps also designs required interfaces, master data management, data conversions, extensions, reports and change management requirements with a focus on process change, people concerns, communication, and training for a successful implementation.

For customers looking to define processes ahead of any business system evaluation and assessment, Apps business process engineering services can help establish a baseline, following these five fundamental best practices:

• Customer Needs: The business process must be designed to improve the customer experience and make it easier to do business with your organization
• Core Processes: The business process should identify opportunities to process data efficiently to all parties who require access, as well as call out people and roles required to support executing the process
• Cross-Functional: The business process needs to be designed to support the entire organization, not just a specific department. Designing the best order management system for customer service users may create additional work for downstream and upstream processes like sales quoting and accounts receivable.
• Organization Impact: The best process design will only work if the people follow the process. A new business process needs to consider the impact to the people performing the tasks, and mitigation steps to address risk in these areas.
• Execute and Track: Ensure that the business users are able to execute on the new process efficiently, and track improvement metrics based on deploying the new solution.

Adrian King, CEO

“As a seasoned enterprise application advisory services leader with more than two decades of experience aligning business and technology imperatives, Apps Associates serves as an extension of your business.”