How a Global Data Analytics Company Established Their Single Source of Truth Across a Decade of Acquisitions

As this global data analytics company expanded through multiple acquisitions, it managed a growing number of professional services teams, each using separate tools, processes, and data. Without a unified platform to standardize delivery and reporting, integrating newly acquired teams into a shared way of working became a significant coordination and operational challenge.

The company adopted Planview AdaptiveWork as its enterprise-wide system of record for professional services delivery, using it to drive Professional Services Automation (PSA). Planview’s value extended further through integrations with Salesforce, Workday, and a homegrown billing system. This connected ecosystem accelerated onboarding of acquired teams onto a single platform, provided leadership with real-time visibility across all lines of business, and created a repeatable playbook for integrating future teams.

Over the past decade, this global data analytics company has grown significantly through mergers and acquisitions. Its Business Services and Consulting organization now includes more than ten lines of business across various industries and regions. Integrating acquired professional services teams, each with their own tools, historical data, and ways of working, has been essential to managing this growth.

The company implemented a dedicated professional services solution in 2018, when its team of 60 to 80 users outgrew spreadsheet-based tools. It was clear they needed greater governance, structure, and scalability, but less obvious was just how much and fast the business would continue to grow.

Initially, a finance executive outside the professional services organization managed the platform, resulting in a configuration focused on finance workflows rather than project delivery. The system lacked dashboards to track hours, revenue, average billing rates, and current backlog. Upon joining, the current Head of Delivery Operations prioritized rebuilding the system around actual professional services operations.

A more significant challenge was structural. As the company continued to acquire businesses, each professional services team arrived with its own platform and institutional history. Some teams were small and still working from spreadsheets, while larger teams were deeply embedded in more mature tools. Before adopting AdaptiveWork, Professional Services leads cycled through systems every two years, always hitting the limits of less configurable tools.

The stakes rose considerably when the company acquired a professional services organization of 200 consultants that had recently implemented Salesforce’s FinancialForce. The company had to decide whether to absorb the new team into the existing environment or abandon what they had built and adopt the incoming platform.

Maturity and configurability drove the decision. AdaptiveWork offered longstanding configuration capabilities, established workflows, and a proven track record with existing teams, while the acquired team’s FinancialForce system was new and untested at scale. Consolidating into the existing environment was more practical and cost-effective. After reconfiguring the platform to match Professional Services operations, it became the connective tissue between strategy and execution, giving the SVP clear visibility into how team capacity and active engagements map to broader business priorities.

The migration involved moving 200 users and their historical data within a year to avoid renewing its FinancialForce agreement. The company and its Planview implementation team prioritized speed, executing a considerable lift-and-shift effort across global teams to minimize disruption.

After the migration, the company integrated Salesforce to automatically transfer opportunity and pipeline data from the CRM into the platform, removing manual handoffs. The Planview platform now manages the entire delivery lifecycle: standardized project templates ensure consistent setup, workflow automation and validation rules reduce manual errors, and time tracking feeds directly into financial management for billing and revenue recognition.

Integrating Workday added greater efficiency. Previously, employees manually entered their paid time off into AdaptiveWork, often resulting in inconsistencies and unreliable capacity planning. Now, approved and updated PTO syncs automatically from Workday weekly, covering 75 to 80% of the professional services user base. This automation saves more than 10.000 manual entries annually.

Smaller acquired teams on spreadsheets were onboarded by mapping their existing metadata fields and building custom actions to ease the transition. Larger groups with established processes required structured change management, including locked timesheets at month-end, governance guardrails for data consistency, and a shift toward out-of-the-box features to enhance stability. The Planview platform now serves as the central system of record across business lines. Consultants use it to plan and track delivery work, while time and expense data flow directly into financial management for revenue recognition and billing. Finance teams pull month-end reporting without the need for unnecessary reconciliation meetings.

For executive visibility, platform data feeds into a centralized data lake, where Power BI provides cross-functional dashboards. Senior leaders gain a unified, interactive view of performance across the portfolio.

Estimated number of manual PTO entries are eliminated annually through the Workday integration, freeing capacity planning to run on accurate, real-time data across 75-80% of the PS user base.

Since implementing AdaptiveWork, the organization has grown from 70 users to nearly 600 licenses across more than ten lines of business, with each acquired team consolidated onto the same platform rather than adding another disconnected system to manage. Monthly financial closes, once requiring manual reconciliation meetings between Professional Services leads and finance, are now completed through automated reports. Senior leaders have real-time access to key metrics, such as hours logged, revenue recognized, average billing rates, and current backlog, without waiting for a meeting or a spreadsheet.

Teams can now quantify metrics that previously required guesswork, such as time from project creation to first customer contact and the average duration of different project types. Leadership now has faster access to data that once required significant manual effort.

The company has now entered Phase 2: moving from lift-and-shift migration to a strategic redesign of how the platform is used across all lines of business. The goal is to standardize fields and revenue tracking across groups so that enterprise-wide forecasting, long described as the team's north star objective, becomes achievable. An active acquisition is already underway, with plans to integrate the new team through a JIRA connector that lets R&D and delivery teams stay in their respective systems while sharing the data both sides need.