Sapient Corp. - Company Profile

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Sapient Corp. - IT Services - Category Directory

(617) 621-0200

One Memorial Drive

Cambridge, MA 02142

www.sapient.com

Sales

$185 million

Business Description

Sapient, a leading business and technology consultancy, helps Global 2000 clients achieve measurable business results through the rapid application and support of advanced technology, primarily on a fixed-price basis. We are focused on making technology matterSM, by identifying, implementing and supporting technology-enabled solutions that create near- and long-term business value for our clients. We create value for our clients through our unique approach: a passion for delivering measurable business results; a fundamentally different methodology; a commitment to fixed-price and fixed-time delivery; our expertise in globally distributed delivery; and our ability to design our solutions for adoption.

We provide a wide range of business and technology consulting services that enable our clients to realize tangible business value from their advanced technology investments. We have many years of experience implementing advanced technologies that can improve our clients’ businesses, including more than twelve years of experience with client/server and UNIX solutions, more than ten years of experience integrating package applications with legacy systems, more than eight years of experience with Internet solutions and more than six years of experience with wireless technologies. More recently, we have been an early implementor of new technologies such as Microsoft.NET and Web Services. We combine this technology expertise with our design skills and our deep understanding of user needs to ensure that our client solutions are effectively adopted by their intended audiences. The following are examples of the types of services that generate business value for our clients:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM). We assist our clients in improving their customer relationships by focusing their business processes and technology infrastructure on the needs and wants of their customers. By increasing their customer focus, our clients can better retain their customers and reduce their costs of customer service. The primary aim of our customer relationship management solutions is to systematically use information about customer wants and needs to create and maintain the desired customer experience consistently across all channels of customer interaction. We focus on integrating our solutions across multiple sales channels and with diverse legacy systems, in order to create a user-centered experience that is consistent, reliable and easy-to-use.

High-Volume Transaction Systems. We have extensive experience designing and implementing online portals, exchanges, purchasing systems, retail Internet sites and other transaction-processing systems capable of reliably handling very large volumes of transactions. These systems also reduce processing time and lower our clients’ operating costs. We further enhance the value provided by these systems by integrating the online channel with other distribution systems such as catalog systems and in-store kiosks. We also assist our clients in improving and integrating their business processes to optimize the effectiveness of these transaction systems.

Interactive Brand Experiences. We enable our clients to strengthen their communications with prospective customers by designing and developing high-impact interactive marketing applications and Internet “microsites.” Our strong design capabilities and our expertise in understanding user experience create business value for our clients by allowing them to enhance their target customers’ understanding of, and interest in, our clients’ offerings.

Learning Services. We help our clients enhance interactions with their employees, customers and suppliers by developing learner-centered solutions that generate valuable feedback, improved user understanding and increased loyalty. These solutions include knowledge management systems and workflows, enhanced support tools, intranets and interactive training solutions. These learning solutions also offer cost savings to our clients by increasing the desired utilization of their technology systems and business processes by their employees, customers and suppliers.

Rapid Enterprise Architecture Planning (REAP). We partner with our clients to develop enterprise architecture blueprints in highly compressed time frames. Combining our deep expertise in diverse technologies, our understanding of our clients’ business issues and our collaborative FusionSM workshops, we can, within four to eight weeks, clarify and optimize our clients’ technology infrastructure, redefine their supporting organizational and business processes and develop a road map to achieving their desired technology portfolio.

Software Packages and Legacy Systems. We are often able to provide the most value to our clients by leveraging existing high-quality software packages and our clients’ own legacy systems in our solutions. We have many years of experience implementing solutions using package applications such as application integration packages, content management and delivery systems, customer relationship management software and order management systems. We combine our custom development expertise with these package applications, and we fully integrate the finished product with our clients’ legacy systems.

Supply Chain Management. We have a successful history of developing supply chain management solutions that generate improved efficiency and faster processing times throughout our clients’ supply chains: inventory; order management; customer and supplier integration; demand and production planning; and new product development. These solutions not only reduce cost by increasing efficiency, they can also improve customer loyalty by satisfying customer needs in a quicker time frame and at a lower price.

Support and Maintenance. In order to derive long-term value from an advanced technology solution, a client needs reliable, rapid, cost-effective support. We offer application support 24 hours per day utilizing our Global Distributed DeliverySM model, both for solutions that we develop and for systems developed by others. Our support capabilities help ensure very high up-time and improved performance, because of regular process improvements and system enhancements. Our preemptive maintenance further minimizes the risks of performance problems. By greatly reducing down-time and system performance problems, our support and maintenance offerings assist our clients in realizing significant long-term value from their technology investments.

Through our global presence, we understand and address the business issues that our clients are facing in both local and global contexts. In addition to offices in nine cities throughout the United States, we have offices in Düsseldorf, London, Munich, New Delhi and Toronto, and we own 50% of the voting stock of a consulting joint venture in Milan. Further information about our international operations is located in Note 2 in the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included in this Annual Report. We employed approximately 1,425 people worldwide as of February 28, 2003.

We have leveraged this global presence to create our Global Distributed DeliverySM (GDD) model, which enables us to deliver complex, customized technology solutions across multiple geographies. Many distributed development models involve simply building software applications from a remote location or augmenting domestic project teams with resources that travel from overseas. Our GDD model, on the other hand, involves the complex, daily interaction of development teams in a remote location (typically highly skilled technology specialists in our New Delhi office) working closely with development and client teams in North America or Europe in a single, coordinated effort. In order to work effectively in this globally distributed environment, we have built extensive expertise in managing the daily transitions of software code, specifications and project management issues between the various development teams that are needed for continuous, around-the-clock project work. By utilizing our GDD model, we can deliver complex, high-quality solutions to our clients at a lower cost, and deliver these solutions more rapidly by working across multiple time zones. In the twelve months ended December 31, 2002, projects involving a GDD component accounted for 45% of our total service revenues.

We deliver our services in the United States primarily through six industry business units: financial services; technology and communications; consumer and transportation; automotive and industrial; public services; and energy services. We deliver our services in Europe primarily through our United Kingdom and Germany business units, and we deliver our services in Canada primarily through our Canadian business unit. Within our international business units, we focus our sales and delivery efforts on certain industry specializations. Through our global industry focus, we have developed an extensive understanding of our clients’ markets and are able to effectively address the market dynamics and business opportunities that our clients face. This understanding further enables us to identify and focus on critical, industry-specific business processes that are specifically enabled by advanced technologies. Further information about our operating segments is located in Note 2 in the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included in this Annual Report.

Spient's Approach

Our approach is designed to address the biggest problem that most companies face when pursuing technology projects: the majority of technology projects are finished late or over budget, lack promised capabilities or simply are never finished. Because of our approach, we are able to commit to delivering our solutions within the price and time frame that we have promised to our clients. Our approach enables us to create advanced technology solutions that bring together business, user and technology requirements to solve the business problems that our clients are facing. These solutions are designed to deliver tangible business value to clients in the form of increased revenues, reduced costs and more effective utilization of assets. We believe that our approach differentiates us from our competitors, and that our clients derive substantial benefits from the following elements of this approach:

We focus on measurable business results. We are passionate about delivering measurable business results to our clients and we are willing to put our fees at risk against those results. We define our success by whether we enable our clients to attain their desired business value. For more than a decade, we have helped many of the world’s top companies realize significant value from their technology investments. Our culture is engineered around client value. It is collaborative, forthright and characterized by a determination to do whatever it takes to deliver meaningful results to our clients.

We use a fundamentally different methodology. We have a fundamentally different methodology for advanced technology projects, which is designed to rapidly create organizational ownership and momentum. The Sapient ApproachSM, which has been refined and improved continuously for twelve years, is designed to ensure the success of our clients’ technology investments. It is structured around an initial set of workshops (FusionsSM) that create alignment and momentum across all business and technology users. We then document the business, user and technical processes that will achieve the desired business value, and build and deploy a technology solution that addresses the client’s needs within the promised time and price. We discover, assess, design and deliver these solutions at speed, while they still matter. From our industry-specific expertise that provides us with an understanding of the threats and opportunities our clients face, to our focused project planning and delivery methodologies, we have built our entire approach around rapid, collaborative delivery.

We are committed to fixed-price, fixed-time delivery. We have developed a strong legacy of delivering our solutions on a fixed-price, fixed-time basis, since our formation in 1991. Because of our extensive experience delivering these types of projects, and our expertise with large-scale, complex project management, we are able to successfully deliver our solutions within the price and time frame we have promised to our clients. Our fixed-price, fixed-time legacy helps our clients avoid the lost business value that occurs when technology projects are finished late or over budget, lack promised capabilities or are never finished.

We work on a globally distributed basis. We offer a fully integrated, Global Distributed DeliverySM capability. Through our GDD model, we are able to create high-value solutions for our clients quickly and at a competitive cost advantage, thereby increasing overall value. With team members located across different time zones, we are able to work around-the-clock on design and implementation. We maintain the high quality of our solutions by utilizing India’s highly skilled technology specialists. Because these specialists have been highly trained in managing complex projects on a globally distributed basis, and work closely each day with Sapient and client team members in North America or Europe, we are able to successfully deliver complex, customized technology projects that are typically not possible under traditional remote development models.
Our solutions are designed for adoption. We provide proprietary research-driven insights into people that enable us to implement technology solutions that are designed for adoption. Technology solutions deliver real business value only if they are designed with a deep understanding of the people who must use the technology. Through our user research, strategy and design capabilities, we ensure that our client solutions are effectively adopted by their intended audiences.

People and Culture

We have developed a strong corporate culture that is critical to our success, and we have defined six core values that inspire our work and serve as guides for every engagement: client-focused delivery; leadership; relationships; creativity; openness; and people growth.

To encourage the achievement of these core values, we actively reward teamwork and use adoption of our core values as a measure to evaluate performance and give promotions. Also, we have an intensive orientation program for new employees to introduce them to our core values, as well as a number of internal communications and training initiatives defining and promoting these core values.

As of December 31, 2002, we had 1,491 full-time employees, composed of 1,163 project personnel, 264 general and administration personnel and 64 sales and marketing personnel. Although our rate of voluntary turnover increased during portions of 2002, our voluntary turnover rate began to return closer to our targeted level of 15% during the three months ended December 31, 2002. We attribute our low turnover rates, in large part, to the high caliber of our employees and our commitment to maintaining the values on which our success has been based. None of our employees are subject to a collective bargaining agreement. We believe that we have good relationships with our employees.