I got a chance to sit down and get the latest from the president of Meridian Systems, John Bodrozic, to better understand how the market dynamics have changed with the sluggish economy and reduction of working capital in the private sector but at that the same time the increase in governmental spending has impacted their software business. For those of you who do not know Meridian Systems is a significant provider of applications for organizations that need to manage their people and capital intensive business more effectively and follow what they call the Plan-Build-Operate processes. While other ERP vendors provide applications that are driven from manufacturing, service and other industries that operate from a customer, order and service perspective that have struggled to provide the P in ERP which is even more critical in project and people intensive projects. The need of organizations that do architecture, construction, engineering in private or public sector that are project-oriented and capital budget managed efforts are much different and require applications that meet their specific needs.

While it might not seem obvious but the planning and management of the resources and capital for these types of project is not so simple and not as methodical or repeatable as every project are mostly different than the same. Of course public projects have long been the standing joke of not being very well managed seem to more often than not to have cost overruns and usually never on time making them quite skeptical in approval by voters and to some state and US congressional members. Now to even more importance is the US federal government increased ‘stimulus’ projects that are to increase the shovel-ready or what I would call get people-to-work jobs in everything from transportation, schools, energy, water, environment and generally building projects.

Now these projects are not just unique and done once but include sub-contractor agencies for labor to skills that can quickly complicate projects as their resources, schedules and assets to supports these projects are critical to operating within budget and time constraints and require what I called integrated business to business planning. The problem is quite clear, a bigger mess the government will create might be the visual that comes to mind, but Meridian has been serving this industry needs for applications to plan-build-operate (PBO) in this environment and as you can imagine is finding significantly increased demand for their applications in what many know as project portfolio management and then once operated is known as facility management. Also as new pressure and requirements to report on the status of these ‘stimulus’ projects is requiring significant overhead as the detail and delivery of this reporting and underlying analytics is no easy task and not intended to be done in spreadsheets. Managing funds by projects and providing greater accountability and transparency has always appeared to me to be an oxymoron, but now can be addressed with some software designed for the task at hand.

Meridian application for this is called Proliance and operates in a web-based environment using web-services and Internet architecture to also enable a project to integrate the variety of people across the supply chain of individuals and organizations participating in the project. Proliance handles much of what you would expect from the planning and management of the details of the project, along with the details of building and eventually operating the project. The essentials of which are key to any project and are part of what we refer to as integrated business planning where you bring together all the necessary inputs to determine the overall plan and do the scenario and adjustments to meet the time, costs and goals of the project. Critical though has been their expansion to provide what we call integrated business reporting and analytics that can be used to support alerting to scorecards. This layer of analytics from Meridian Systems was a critical extension to their applications as the information about the projects is just as important but the metrics are what I call the currency that matters. This is also where Meridian will need to expand for simple to sophisticated costing and support a new age of key process and key risk indicators (KRI) that support the need to address risk issues in projects as this is a key component of every project that is not well planned for to understand external and project elements that impact the successful planning and building. Meridian is making it simpler recently with introduction of starter-packs to help onboard projects into their environment to provide the level of oversight and project management processes that are standard in the industry and slowly getting infused into governmental projects.

Of course a little marketing goes a long ways and by coining their PBO focus to PBObama with a little patriotic element of the US Flag provides the symbolism that everyone in government should take a little more pride and a lot more management of each of the US taxpayer dollars to mind when doing any project. Of course the heightened scrutiny with the specially approved stimulus dollars that should create jobs and deliver results that every American can be proud of. For Meridian, they have only scratched the surface in regards to penetration of this market is the US let alone the rest of the world and if they can continue their focus on the business and operations of organizations with their applications and avoid the IT quagmire of infrastructure and technology that can get in the way of much needed improvements. Meridian has a great opportunity to be part of the new generation of application vendors, and with over 15 years of experience and thousands of customers, their focus on project and people projects are part of having the right level of commitment and dedication needed in this market today.

Now if the US government would require smarter management of their stimulus and budget projects to ensure that waste is removed, time is saved and that projects are delivered to schedule and costs allocated, we would all be in a better place today. Unfortunately we have not heard this in any sustentative detail yet from President Obama key leaders that are the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Aneesh Chopra and Chief Performance Officer – Jeffrey Zients who should be setting higher standards on how applications drive efficiency and effectiveness of our tax dollars, but maybe they will take note of Meridian Systems work. Let’s hope we get a better process to using business technology in our government and that they do not get bogged down with legacy and infrastructure and not focused to the needs for performance management through applications that can help us build confidence and trust in our or any government that take taxes to provide back to the people in many different forms of services and social good. If this happens, it will be good for the government, taxpayers and for Meridian Systems.

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Regards,

Mark Smith - CEO & EVP Research