Penon Partners
Empower Your Business to Drive Digital Transformation

Before he lost his job, Kevin T. was the CIO of WhyCorp, a large company digitalizing operations at many levels. From IT operations to Go to Market and Product lifecycle, WhyCorp was struggling to keep up with aggressive new competition coming from tech startups, other countries, and new strategic partnerships by existing competitors.

Despite a tremendous effort and mobilization of teams, WhyCorp’s digital transformations did not achieve the desired outcomes for the business and the company. Only about 15 percent of employees estimated that the changes helped them improve productivity and outcomes.

Maximizing the potential of digital transformation remains a challenge for organizations seeking to adapt and thrive in today’s competitive and technologically advanced market. This is where Penon Partners, a leading provider of digital transformation services, can be an asset to organizations.

“Most studies show that more than 60 percent of organizations are not reaping the benefits of their digital transformations,” says Jean-Christophe Laurent, CEO of Penon Partners. As an example, the Boston Consulting Group analyzed digital transformation in 825 organizations. The results showed that 70 percent of digital transformations fail, falling short of their objectives, which often produces profound consequences.

Penon Partners has identified 4 main reasons why many, like Kevin, fail to reap the benefits of digital transformation.

1 – Frequently, business leaders drive the need for change and initiate a digital transformation project. However, business teams tend to delegate too much to technical teams (IT and R&D), most notably the project accountability, governance, testing, and budget. Then, step by step, the project deviates from a core business transformation project to a “technical solution” with some business changes. If discussions in meetings are about interfaces, settings, batch, servers, etc, then the project is deviating towards a technical solution and IT may succeed in the implementation, but the business may not achieve the digital transformation.

2 – Teams underestimate the complexity of the execution and the impact on the business. “This is easy, we just do this and that….” This reason is amplified by the fact that modern solutions are sold to be more plug-and-play, without development. Therefore, the allocated resources and plans are not strong or sufficient enough to deliver value. The consequences are delays, additional costs, disappointment, and poor outcomes.

3 – Lack of communication and misalignment of goals between all stakeholders, especially for large business and digital transformations. The people involved are not moving towards common goals and/or they won’t comprise. Egos become involved and it becomes harder to succeed and bring value. There must be constant alignment and monitoring of goals.

4 – Clients have too many projects at the same time. This results in an unrealistic roadmap and conflicting teams. Everyone is overwhelmed attempting to balance daily operations and multiple projects. One can imagine the outcome and the frustration.

“Penon Partners was created to ensure clients reap the benefits of their digital transformation,” says JC Laurent.

Penon Partners specializes in executing strategic transformations in Operations, IT, and Finance to help businesses maximize their benefits and achieve their desired outcomes.

“Most studies show that more than 60 percent of organizations are not reaping the benefits of their digital transformations”

To tackle these concerns, Penon Partners has developed a proven approach (SAIL©, Simply Achieve Implementation Longevity) that ensures its clients reap the full benefits of their digital transformations.

The approach prioritizes business goals and helps clients develop a governance structure that places the business in the lead, with IT as a partner. By adopting this structure, the transformation process remains aligned with primary objectives, empowering all the decisionmakers to steer seamlessly throughout the entire process. Penon Partners also helps clients understand the transformation’s impacts on all areas of their business and develops mitigation measures to address potential issues to ensure benefits for all stakeholders. This all-encompassing strategy ensures that all transformation benefits are captured from the stakeholders and individual workers.

In addition to governance and impact assessments, Penon Partners provides change leadership to ensure that everyone within the organization understands and adopts the changes with a business focus. At the heart of the firm’s change leadership approach is a deep understanding of the importance of alignment. It helps create an environment where change is embraced as an opportunity for growth and success rather than a daunting challenge.

“Our philosophy centers on a customer-centric approach where we uphold the belief that our success is intrinsically tied to your success,” says JC Laurent.

Penon Partners has earned a reputation for its successful collaborations with numerous top-tier companies globally, and its partnership with US manufacturing and service companies stand out as exemplary cases in point, as demonstrated in the following use case examples:

1 – A manufacturing company launched a worldwide digital transformation program with D365 F&O, with a KOFAX OCR RPA automation to better operate and standardize their core business processes.

Penon Partners led the US region implementation project and change management throughout all the phases of the program and for all the business streams (“Manufacturing”, “Order to Cash”, “Procure to Pay”, “Finance” and “BI-Reporting’). The challenge was to align the future processes with local business activities and to engage local actors to ensure adoption and business alignment. The ERP D365 F&O and KOFAX went live in the US region with a fast ramp-up adoption.

Our philosophy centers on a customer-centric approach where we uphold the belief that our success is intrinsically tied to your success

2 – After multiple acquisitions, a large hardware and service company decided to unify and enhance the online customer experience (CX) provided for their customers. Penon Partners drove the CX Program, and designed the future operating model and the system architecture with the business leaders (sales enablement, operations, marketing, customer service, technical support, IT, and R&D). In five months, all business leaders were aligned on the future model, some quick wins were already implemented to improve the current experience without changing systems, and the global software RFP (Sales Force based) was complete, ready for the final decision by the COO.

3 – In the hospitality industry, a global company was hosting all their critical apps in the United States which resulted in the global customers (Europe, Asia) being long hauled to a US data center impacting customer experience. Penon Partners’ experts architected, designed, and implemented an infrastructure solution on AWS regions that leveraged AWS’ Content Delivery Network enabling an elastic traffic split between regions with capabilities to follow the demand. The company improved the mobile and web application performance as well as improving hotel front desk functions including check-ins/outs.

Penon Partners prides itself on providing comprehensive solutions that support clients at all stages of the transformation process. From initial diagnosis to execution and management of the transition, its team of successful and seasoned business leaders has led compelling transformation stories. They support clients from their vision statement to operationalize the change within their team. The company leverages the proven SAIL© method which combines consulting and leadership practices while maintaining structure and sticking to the point. With an amazing 100 percent renewal rate, Penon Partners has built a loyal customer base that keeps expanding. It has grown a reputation for delivering exceptional results across diverse industries, including IoT, software services, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and hospitality. Penon Partners’ track record is a testimony to its commitment to delivering effective and long-lasting solutions that drive meaningful change and generate tangible value for its clients.