Dennison & Associates is a technology consulting firm that helps associations select and implement enterprise systems. With a team of seven consultants, the firm handles everything from operational assessments to end-to-end software selection. But managing complex evaluations—often wrangling over a thousand distinct requirements per project—created significant friction when relying on legacy tools.
The Cost of the "Spreadsheet Overwhelm"
Before adopting a dedicated platform, the firm managed its massive requirement lists in Excel. This created immediate bottlenecks. Clients faced a wall of text, making it difficult to rate or prioritize needs. Often, the sheer volume of the spreadsheet meant clients would simply skim the document and say "looks great," rather than providing the critical feedback the consultants needed.
Internally, the manual workload was severe. Consolidating vendor responses and trying to translate them into clear, numerical comparisons for clients was a massive administrative drain.
“When we were getting vendor responses and demo scoring in Excel, it could take my staff 20 or 30 hours to compile those scores into something useful, put it into graphs, and make it consumable so that it actually fed into a decision instead of just being a pile of numbers.”
Perhaps the biggest risk of the unstructured spreadsheet environment was its impact on stakeholder inclusion. Dennison & Associates knows that missing front-line users during the selection phase often leads to costly issues during implementation. But because it was so difficult to educate a wide group of users on how to navigate the complex Excel files, the firm was often forced to limit the number of stakeholders involved.
Targeted Engagement and Real-Time Scoring
To solve this, Dennison & Associates moved their end-to-end selection process into Olive. The platform fundamentally shifted how clients and vendors interacted with the evaluation.
Instead of sending a monolithic document, the team began filtering requirements by department. Now, a stakeholder in the membership department only receives a targeted survey with membership-specific requirements. Because the interface is highly intuitive—using stars and smiley faces for prioritization rather than arbitrary 1-to-5 numerical scales—the firm can gather feedback from a much wider group of users with almost no training required.
This clarity extends to vendor presentations. Instead of taking notes and trying to remember details later, clients use Olive to score vendors in real-time while watching the demos. This prevents stakeholders from confusing different vendors and ensures the firm captures accurate, immediate reactions.
Reclaiming Hours and Accelerating Delivery
By automating the flow of data, Dennison & Associates eliminated the manual work that previously stalled their projects. Vendors now input their scoring directly into the system, and Olive automatically generates the comparative graphs and visual dashboards.
Tasks that used to take 30 hours—like pulling together demo surveys and scoring—now take roughly five hours. By standardizing their process and easily pulling reusable requirements from project to project, the firm ensures consistent quality across all clients.
“Since we started using Olive about a year ago, I think we've seen probably a 25% reduction in overall time spent on our projects.”
A Scalable Foundation for Growth
Beyond the immediate time savings, the new system laid the groundwork for better change management. Because more stakeholders are easily included in the initial selection, they feel heard, building crucial buy-in long before the software is actually implemented.
It has also changed how the firm scales its own operations. In the past, expanding the team meant finding rare candidates who possessed both niche association knowledge and the advanced project management skills required to build complex evaluations from scratch.
“I used to have to hire people that not only knew associations and their technology, but also could put a consulting project together from scratch. Now I can hire people with the association knowledge and teach them how to do this process and still get a consistent, quality selection process.”
