Salas O'Brien Consolidates Across 100+ Offices with Planful

Salas O’Brien is an employee-owned technical services engineering firm. It works primarily in mechanical, electrical, and structural engineering, across more than 100 offices in North America, serving 20-plus end markets from data centers and telecom to healthcare, education, and government.

With that much breadth, Salas O’Brien needed reporting that could keep up with the complexity of the business. As the firm continued to grow, finance needed data that could flex to any question, and a platform with the runway to scale.

“Just last year, over ten companies joined Salas O’Brien,” says Blake Widdison, Vice President of Corporate Finance and Accounting at Salas O’Brien. “When you have that kind of accelerated growth happening, having the right tools at your fingertips is absolutely critical.”

Before Planful, finance relied on manual, disconnected processes that couldn’t keep pace with a fast-growing firm. 

“We were doing a lot of work in Excel, which is rigid and not always flexible,” Blake says. “We didn’t really have a planning tool, and all that was being done manually in Excel.” 

The bigger challenge was the complexity of the business. Dozens of legal entities, spread across countries, all had to reconcile into one clean picture, and the consolidation tool the team had couldn’t keep up.

“We have foreign entities, so we needed a tool that could do consolidation and translation of foreign currencies, and intercompany eliminations, among other things,” Blake says.

Continued growth also increased the pressure on finance. Ten mergers in a single year meant more entities, more data, and higher expectations from leadership about how quickly finance could turn all of it into something useful. 

Salas O’Brien needed a platform that could handle the full end-to-end cycle of planning, consolidation, reporting, and analytics, with the dimensional flexibility to report the business in different ways. 

A tool that offered scalability was also crucial for Blake’s team. “We needed something that could grow and scale with us, to meet our needs not only today but in the future,” Blake says.

A standout feature for the team was Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365. “The fact that Planful integrates with Excel through Spotlight, and still lets team members work in the web browser or in Excel, when they prefer, was a really big selling point for us,” Blake says.

• Consolidations built to support multiple currencies and countries. The first priority for Blake’s team was to replace its prior consolidation tool. “Planful gave us the capabilities to handle multi-currency and multi-country operations, and that’s sped up how we consolidate our foreign operations,” Blake says. “For our team, that’s been the biggest game changer.” 
• Reporting that gives leadership flexible views of the business. Leaders need to understand the business by entity, project, client, service line, and end market, and one dataset has to support all of those views. “Planful lets us use the dimensionality in our reporting to slice and dice our data in different ways, and pivot in a very flexible and agile way,” Blake says.
• A central source of truth for the team. Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365 keeps the team in the tools they use every day. “We have integrations with Excel and PowerPoint, and can build things that dynamically, in real time, update directly in PowerPoint,” Blake says. “Our slides and presentations are available just like that.”
• One reporting package instead of one per business unit. The old system meant building and maintaining a custom report for every business unit. “Now Planful lets us build one standard reporting system that we distribute and broadcast to our groups,” Blake says.
• Faster numbers into leadership’s hands. The first speed gains are showing up in reporting. “So far we’ve seen an improvement of one to two days in our post-month-end reporting, which means we’re getting those reports out that much faster to our leadership,” Blake says. 

Salas O’Brien plans to extend Planful in stages across the rest of the finance function, and the team is looking ahead to how AI could support that work. 

“Something we’re going to be making sure we look at across all phases is how do we use AI,” Blake says. “With Planful offering such tremendous AI capabilities, we’re really excited about what this is going to offer us as we improve our consolidation, as we move into budgeting, as we work on our workforce planning, and all other areas where Planful is going to take us to the next level.”

The gains in speed matter, but the bigger change is what the finance team does with the time.

“Planful lets team members spend less time on the data side and more on the transformation into information,” Blake says. “That lets them spend more time being a strategic partner, feeding meaningful information to leadership so they can make data-driven decisions.”

The team is more confident, too, working in a platform built for business intelligence and data analysis. The clearest sign it had taken hold came from the team’s most experienced members. 

“A turning point for us was when we saw some of our senior finance team members, who have been around a long time and been in multiple systems but never really embraced them, get into Planful and start building their own reports,” Blake says. “Once they saw how easy and useful it was, they were willing to get in and pull what they need. That was the moment we felt like we’ve really got a system people are going to use.”