Before using Shark, F.I. Consultants relied on time-consuming, non-standardised spreadsheets that often diverted finance team resources and hindered effective customer conversations, but after seeing Shark's seamless calculation of IRR and NPV, they adopted the platform for its professional approach to financial benefits, streamlined sales processes, and standardised methodology across business functions.
Joshua Fennig is an independent consultant mainly focused on the manufacturing and manufacturing services industries.
Throughout his career, he mostly worked with multinational companies in the manufacturing space across North America, Europe, and Asia. He spent half of his time doing some of the core manufacturing jobs e.g. engineering and production, but the other half of his career revolved around executive management and general management roles.
Before using Shark, both in his current consulting role and in his previous experience, Joshua relied on spreadsheets to create business cases. The main problems he found with this were:
1. Spreadsheets are time consuming and need a lot of time and resource to verify.
2. Taking up valuable time from the Finance team if they needed to be involved, taking them away from their day-to-day job.
3. Spreadsheets are not standardised, making it harder to make investment decisions.
4. It’s difficult to have a conversation with your customer about value when using a spreadsheet.
After seeing the Shark platform in action, he saw that the issues with his current business case methodology could be solved.
Joshua was introduced to Shark Finesse in 2021 during a meeting with one of his clients. After being impressed with how the Shark platform provided a professional approach to calculating financial benefits for customers, he started his own journey with Shark Finesse.
There were a couple of features within Shark that contributed to Joshua moving forward with a Shark programme. These included the fact that the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and Net Present Value (NPV) are both calculated seamlessly within Shark, all from using customer inputs and data. In his experience, the finance department would typically need to be involved to perform this analysis, so being able to eliminate this requirement has a big impact on reducing resources and enabling the assessment of value at an earlier stage in the business cycle.
The last thing that I really liked about it, is the team at Shark. So, although the system and the library of business case opportunities is quite large, the team is helpful at Shark, and they are also able to help you customise things if for any reason there's not enough already inside the lexicon that exists.
<div class="blockquote-author">Joshua Fennig, Owner at F.I. Consultants.</div>
Shark has helped address pre-existing challenges faced by some of Joshua’s clients. For example, it has enabled sales and marketing teams to engage in more collaborative and confident discussions with their customers. Additionally, it has established a standardised methodology that can be applied across the entire business, from sales and marketing to leadership teams.
My favourite feature of Shark, actually, I would say I have two. Firstly, I like how seamlessly Shark calculates internal rate of return sometimes called IRR. In my experience from general management and business management, this is an important metric in analysing the value of different business cases that you're considering. But it's also something that I would say in each of the organisations I was involved in, it took a financial professional from the finance team to be able to calculate it accurately for you to review it and really consider what the impact of each investment was going to be. And although that's a necessary part of a business cycle, it was also pretty time consuming. And so, I love the IRR feature because you can doit fast and relatively accurately in a simplified way. So, a general manager can do it. A sales manager can do it. An engineer can do it, and then they can use that tool to help build and assess the business case at a much earlier stage.
From a user point of view, I really like the business case comparison tool. If you're working on multiple business cases at once and you want to get an idea and compare these side by side, it's very simple click and point functionality. It allows you to very easily see the comparison of each one of those in a much more simplified way. And both of those I like because they give you a lot of information in a very rapid amount of time.
The main reason that I would want to recommend the Shark product is that it's a value-added tool and it's a value-added tool that I think is not easily found within the industries that I work in. The second most important point to me is it's a very cost-effective tool in the marketplace.
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