VFP Consulting at Chicago Certinia Live
Doug Johnston, our COO, led this session alongside Jeremy Bower, Managing Director at ACA, and it turned out to be one of the most candid conversations of the conference.
We were there to talk about why QTC transformations stall and why conventional wisdom about sequencing often leads firms into the very trap they’re trying to avoid.
The session drew on our work with ACA, a real program mid-journey, with real friction, and real lessons we felt were worth sharing openly.
The core issue: ACA had embarked on a QTC transformation while simultaneously trying to define what they actually sell. Reengineering your quoting and billing processes before you have a clear, agreed-upon product catalog creates compounding internal change, and that’s precisely what extended the program well beyond its original timeline. In hindsight, the sequence mattered as much as the strategy itself.
Jeremy was direct about the change management piece too: it needed to start earlier, not as a downstream communication effort, but as a foundational part of the program design. That’s a lesson we’ve seen validated across engagements, and it’s one we’re increasingly explicit about with clients at the outset.
Know your business before you try to automate it. This applies as much to AI as it does to QTC.
The discussion resonated not because the challenges were unique to ACA, but because they weren’t. These are patterns that show up across firms of every size. And the takeaway isn’t that transformation is too hard; it’s that the order of operations is often underestimated, and the cost of getting it wrong compounds quickly.
To start an AI readiness conversation, reach out to our team https://vfpconsulting.wpenginepowered.com/request-a-consultation-2/
