How we protected €500k+ in active Anaplan delivery

How we protected €500k+ in active Anaplan delivery without permanent hires

Two senior Anaplan consultants placed in under ten days. No long-term commitment. A director of an Anaplan partner protecting over half a million euros of signed work.

The situation most partners recognize immediately

A boutique Anaplan partner had multiple projects kick off at roughly the same time. On paper, that is a good problem. In practice, it is one of the most expensive situations a delivery lead can find themselves in.

Their key solution architects were overbooked. The most experienced people - the ones partners rely on to hold projects together when scope moves, clients push back, or something goes wrong - were spread across too many engagements. The warning signs were already there. Burnout risk. Attrition risk. The kind of quiet signals that do not show up in a weekly project report until something breaks.

More than €500k of active client delivery was exposed. Not because the team was not capable, but because the team was finite and the demand was not.

This is the part of partner economics nobody talks about openly. Winning work is the easy part. Delivering it without destroying your senior bench is harder. And the window to solve it is usually measured in weeks, not months.

Why internal hiring was not the answer here

The default move in this situation is to open a role. It feels like the responsible thing to do. It is also, for a project-driven demand spike, the wrong instrument.

Here is why. When a partner starts hiring from zero, the timeline compounds fast. Someone writes the job description. Someone approves it. HR syncs with the hiring manager. The role goes live. CVs arrive. First interviews happen two to three weeks in. Second round. Often a third, because no one wants to be the person who hired wrong on a senior role.

By the time an offer goes out, 8-12 weeks have passed. Then comes the part nobody factors in at the start: good senior consultants are already working somewhere. Two to three months notice is standard.

From "we need someone" to "billable on the project" - four to five months, realistically.

The projects were already running. That math did not work.

The approach - visibility, not scrambling

The difference between scrambling and placing is visibility. When a role opens up in a hurry, most partners default to whoever is available - an old LinkedIn contact, a freelancer someone worked with once, a name that came up in a forwarded email. The selection is shaped by what is reachable in forty-eight hours, not by what is right for the project.

SKU Point runs the opposite model. Over fifty vetted EPM consultants in curated network, with current availability and real knowledge of their strengths. When the partner described the projects, the role, and the timeline, the question was not "who can we find?" It was "who is the right fit, and are they free?"

That shift - from search to match - is what collapses the hiring cycle from weeks to days.

The results

Metric	Outcome
Time to place both consultants	Under 10 days
Active delivery protected	€500k+
Replacement guarantee	14 days, same seniority and rate
Long-term commitment required	None
Client margin	Confidential. Contact us for a non-binding calculation.

Two senior Anaplan consultants placed in under ten days. The at-risk delivery was protected. Margins stayed healthy. And the internal team - the senior architects who had been stretched thin - were freed up to focus on what only they could do: new business, client relationships, development of more junior colleagues.

What the client actually said 

"Managing capacity delivering consultancy is problematic, with peaks and troughs. Working with SKU Point we have the capability to smooth the demand peaks, being able to bring in capability at short notice. SKU Point provided strong reliable resources at short notice, plus they are a nice team."

Director, Bedford Consulting UK 

The phrase that matters here is smooth the demand peaks. That is the real job. Partner demand is not stable. It arrives in spikes, often when two or three deals close within a few weeks of each other. A delivery model that cannot absorb those spikes without damaging the core team is not a delivery model. It is a fixed-cost structure hoping demand cooperates. 

The takeaway for partner delivery leads

If your last two quarters have included a moment where multiple projects started at once and you watched your senior architects absorb the hit - this is the pattern. It is not a one-off. It is how boutique partner demand actually behaves. 

The question is not whether it will happen again. It will. The question is what your delivery model does when it does. 

Do you have a project in your pipeline with a potential delivery risk? Let's talk.

Štěpán Zechovský

Founder, SKU Point

About author

I help Anaplan and Pigment partners secure and deliver larger projects without staffing delays, bench risk, or long-term hiring commitments.

My work is guided by clarity, trustworthiness, and speed - helping clients and partners achieve maximum ROI through fast, reliable delivery backed by deep hands-on experience.