YouGov is an international market research group and member of the British Polling Council, founded in the UK in 2000. It has grown as an online agency offering omnibus, field and tab survey services, qualitative research, syndicated products and market intelligence reports.
The US is the company’s largest global market out of the five it now operates in, having floated on London’s AIM stock exchange in 2005 – the same year it opened its first office in the Middle East, YouGovSiraj. From 2007 it has grown both organically and by acquiring market research firms in the US (YouGov Polimetrix), Germany (YouGov Psychonomics) and Scandinavia (YouGov Zapera) and most recently France, which form part of the YouGov Group.
Private and public sector organisations use YouGov services to collect in-depth data for market research and stakeholder consultation, providing a view of their staff, customers, brands, markets and investors, as well as assessing opinion among the general public and media.
Before hosted software, delivered ‘as a service’ (SaaS), became synonymous with cloud computing, YouGov began managing end-to-end business processes across its global subsidiaries with internet-based software to obtain single consolidated financial view in real time.
Alan Newman, chief financial officer (CFO) at YouGov, explains how the company first came to start using NetSuite in 2007, following a period of acquisition.
Newman says the company began using the software provider's OneWorld business management application as the group enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to replace Sage in the UK and various ERP instances run by subsidiaries.
"One of the attractions was less IT infrastructure managed directly by the company itself," Newman continues. "We don't have to add more IT infrastructure to grow our ERP system. If you can give it to a specialist who understand how to manage it in a data centre better, then absolutely, that's got to be a better way of doing it."
The company evaluated other systems at the time, including Microsoft Navision. But the CFO says there was an understanding of the importance of using a single system of record for "glueing acquired companies together," as he put it. "The core of our business is internet-based," he says. "We manage major distributed systems of our own in centralised two data centres. So the concept of 'cloud computing' was almost a non-concept.
As an early adopter of NetSuite OneWorld, YouGov has worked closely with the software provider to implement and grow the application's use throughout its organisation. "As NetSuite has grown it has invested a huge amount of development resource," Newman comments. "And its people are much more responsive to customers than any other software house I've dealt with."
An important milestone for YouGov came when NetSuite's became the first generally available SaaS business management suites to be certified by the German Institute of Auditors (Institut der Wirtchaftsprüfer in Deutschland e.V.) in 2009. Around two-thirds of the research firm's staff are currently NetSuite users and many of those are based in Germany.
The move enabled YouGov to consolidate the financial reporting of its German subsidiary, Psychonomics, into the company's overall global operations. The intention was to take full advantage of NetSuite OneWorld's multi-country, multi-currency functionality.
Since then, Newman says YouGov has used its NetSuite systems to integrate new acquisitions, including three US companies in the last two years. "The last one of those is coming onto NetSuite this year," he adds. "The link it provides between the customer-facing, sales and back-end finance people is very important."
However, he cautions: "Getting people to understand that getting 'good' data out of the system is only as good as the data you are putting in is important." This meant some cultural adjustments internally. But he added: "If it's not on the system, it doesn't exist."
The SaaS transition has been key to supporting the rapid growth YouGov has generated, according to the CFO.
"The huge advantage in today's world of a web-based system means you are able to give people access wherever they are; they can work from home, and the fact we could instantly roll it out in Paris without any localisation issues when we opened a new office there recently, are an obvious advantage," he says.
"But for me," Newman adds, "as an application, the most important NetSuite benefit is the integrated CRM and finance information."
He continued: "Ours is predominantly entirely a B2B [business-to-business] business. A lot of our work has a project element, driven at the front end by sales. But the fact that you can have researchers and other people working on a client start at the first part of the business process with a contact and leads, and a pipeline it can flow, through is invaluable.
"And then, when the deal's closed, the fact that they can then trigger the finance process in terms of invoicing on the sales side, as well as on the costs side, using one database, with one set of information about the customer, is tremendously valuable at an economic cost that's a lot lower than many other, larger scale ERPs. We avoid that 'which number is my sales number' conversation that is, in my experience, endemic where you have multiple databases."
It "absolutely works for YouGov" that the cloud provides one single source of the truth, so much so that more departments, including marketing, are enthusiastic about using it, Newman concluded. Looking ahead, the research firm is looking at adopting further NetSuite modules, including the human resource (HR) part of the suite.
