Innovation and inspiration: Wipfli Annual Report, 2019-2020

Hoping to experience a higher level of service, a family-owned industrial corporation made the decision to switch its tax and audit provider to Wipfli. Because Wipfli strives to be proactive in the solutions offered to clients, this decision led to $30 million in savings that kept the client operational during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Due to the pandemic’s impact on businesses, Congress and the IRS made substantial tax-related changes. Wipfli saw a big opportunity for the client with two of those changes. First, the CARES Act enacted a five-year net operating loss (NOL) carryback opportunity for losses incurred in tax years beginning in 2018-2020. Prior to the CARES Act, these NOLs were only allowed to be carried forward.

The second change involved a new IRS regulation that allowed companies to revisit depreciation elections made in prior years. The client had made a significant acquisition in the 2018 tax year, but they had elected out of bonus depreciation because they already had a significant NOL for the year that could only be carried forward.

Wipfli presented the opportunity to the client that by amending their 2018 return to take bonus depreciation, they could increase their NOL by approximately $66 million. Then, due to the CARES Act NOL carryback provisions, that loss could be carried back to prior tax years, which were very profitable, to generate a $30 million federal tax refund.

The client was extremely happy to learn of this opportunity and had Wipfli amend the 2018 return and file the NOL carryback claim. The refund claim was filed in early June, and the client received their refund by the end of July, providing significant cash flow to ease liquidity concerns during the pandemic.

When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted its operations, the Montgomery Community Action Agency (MCAA) was challenged to navigate the pandemic through both the short- and long-term. As a nonprofit used to frequent in-person interactions with its clients, MCAA needed to determine what reopening would look like, how to reframe operations to support a new normal based around virtual service delivery, and how to set itself up for success when navigating future unanticipated change.

In response to client needs, Wipfli had recently launched a new service focused on managing unanticipated change. The nonprofit involved in the pilot of this service recommended it to MCAA.

Over the course of four weeks, Wipfli worked with a core MCAA team via a series of workshops to manage current change and plan for future impacts. This involved first setting a solid foundation of understanding team dynamics and change management principles, as well as who in MCAA was impacted by what changes and to what level. Then Wipfli built off this foundation by creating a communication support plan, bolstering MCAA’s current change efforts with best practices. Finally, Wipfli helped MCAA assess its critical areas; create a tactical vision that outlined best, worst and most likely scenarios; and develop a 90-day action plan.

As a result, MCAA could put their ideas on paper and break them down into bite-sized and actionable pieces. They could identify what actions to take tomorrow, a month from then, and 6-12 months in the future. And they could make decisions based on best practices and a 90-day plan based on strategic thinking.

When first bringing Wipfli on board, MCAA’s CEO, Dr. Benjamin Jones, said, “I have legal pads full of strategies to deal with things, and no way to put them in order of importance or execution.” After partnering with Wipfli, he said, “I feel like we have a plan to move forward and a way to communicate around the changes that have to be made.”

Rural areas have faced their own challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mountains Community Hospital in southern California has fewer than 40 beds to serve roughly 26,000 people who live in the town of Lake Arrowhead and the surrounding rural area. The hospital was uncomfortable with the risk of COVID-19 patients spreading the virus to medical staff or the hospital’s vulnerable long-term-care patients, so they turned to Wipfli for a solution.

Wipfli worked with hospital management to deploy mobile trailers in its parking lot. The first would be used for intaking patients who displayed COVID-19 symptoms, two others would be equipped with beds and oxygen for patient care, and the fourth would serve as sleeping quarters for overworked doctors and nurses.

The Wipfli Technology Management team then set up network extenders to expand the hospital’s Wi-Fi signal to the trailers and connect medical staffers’ phones, computers and tablets from the trailers to the hospital’s secure network. Video monitors were placed to support virtual conferencing and patient visits, with Microsoft Teams providing a platform for communications and collaboration. Everything was running within an hour of setup.

As a result of Wipfli’s work, nurses can test patients for COVID-19 and create electronic health records without bringing potentially contagious patients into the main hospital building. Daily staff meetings are held virtually using Teams instead of in-person in one conference room. Even after social distancing rules are relaxed, the hospital plans to use Teams for employees who can’t physically make it to the daily huddles.

The Contingent knew they needed to move to a cloud database tool to manage their relationships. For their Every Child Oregon program, they were collecting information from interested people via web forms that pushed the information into a SQL database. However, their team had to export everything to Excel and then sift through thousands of datapoints — and keeping the latest version of the Excel document between employees was almost impossible.

With limited resources to spend on technology, The Contingent needed to start small and add more functionality later. The modulization offered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM was ideal. And Wipfli proved to be the ideal implementation and training partner — a critical part of setting a solid foundation for The Contingent to build off of.

“The Wipfli team recognized that we wanted to develop skills to continue to expand our capabilities,” said Peter Kim, Director of Technology, Data & Evaluation at The Contingent. “So along the way, there’s been moments to be trained on how to follow best practices in developing and architecting Dynamics to extend our own capabilities.”

After implementing Dynamics 365 CRM, Wipfli helped The Contingent do just that. The organization now has the technology they need to connect their programs together, effectively use their data and increase their overall impact. And by owning their implementation and learning how to scale it, The Contingent has increased their return on investment significantly.

They’ve since taken the existing infrastructure Wipfli built and modified it to assist with their Emerging Leaders program and even to launch a new program called Know Me Now. They’ve taken the Every Child Oregon program to the next level to grow their volunteer and event management capabilities. And they’ve launched the My NeighbOR initiative to help distribute supplies to foster families during the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything is fully connected to the centralized Dynamics 365 platform, helping ensure The Contingent is making full use of their data, making the right decisions and increasing engagement and overall impact.

SKS Consulting Group had outgrown its processes. Its operations team had difficulty determining which consultants to assign to projects, as well as which consultants made up a given client team. Information was being entered in multiple places. And because reporting was nearly impossible, billing clients was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. SKS came to Wipfli looking for a technology solution to help its team members spend more time doing what they do best — interacting with clients and building relationships.

First, a two-day workshop mapped out SKS’s current process, identified their pain points and pinpointed where there was waste. The workshop enabled SKS to see where they could adjust to eliminate bottlenecks and steps that didn’t add value, as well as make the process more consistent from client to client.

Then Wipfli implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365. With its centralized dashboard, Dynamics 365 helps SKS’s partners track consultant productivity and overall company performance. They can slice and dice their newly centralized data to provide robust reporting. They can also easily see what upcoming appointments they have, monitor the upcoming assessment pipeline and access live candidate statuses within the assessment process. Plus, viewing client requests for information and replying quickly has never been easier.

Crucially, eliminating paper processes and putting Dynamics 365 into place also made the sudden transition to remote work so much easier, helping to lessen the impact of COVID-19 and keep SKS operations running. Melissa Robinson, Business Operations Leader, said, “We are very grateful to have Dynamics in place; otherwise it would have been absolutely crazy to manage through all our project work without the information readily available in the system.”

With Dynamics 365, SKS is well-positioned to manage its continued business growth and move into the next stage of its digital evolution. SKS describes Dynamics 365 as a launching pad for the future of the firm. And it will be working with Wipfli to further build out the features and functionality that will help it continue to manage its growth and success.

There comes a point when Excel spreadsheets just can’t cut it any longer. Having grown from a family organization to a global nonprofit, Operation Smile was in a need of a better way to track their 6,000+ volunteers. For an organization that provides cleft surgery to children in resource-limited areas, using their volunteers effectively is critical to achieving their mission.

But a volunteer management system (VMS) wasn’t something Operation Smile could just buy off the shelf. So they partnered with Wipfli to develop the technology using Microsoft’s Common Data Model.

Wipfli built the VMS to be a full lifecycle system that allows Operation Smile to recruit, engage, train, deploy and coordinate with their volunteer base. The platform is agile and extensible to integrate with their existing systems, such as learning management, background verification, and financial and donor management.

Operation Smile now has a detailed picture of each one of its volunteers and can easily access information such as specific skills, language spoken, training status and previous missions. Volunteers can now submit, review and see status of applications; set preferences for missions; share availability; update their own profile; access volunteer resources and more.

Operation Smile has a VMS built just for their needs, connecting their teams across the globe and delivering a consistent way to view, manage and utilize thousands of volunteers. And there’s room to scale.

Leaders of Community Action Partnership of Central Illinois (CAPCIL) were committed to improving organizational culture and employee retention, but they were struggling with how to do so — including figuring out why their initial efforts weren’t bearing fruit. Seeking an organizational performance methodology that had been tested and proven in the nonprofit industry, CAPCIL reached out to Wipfli.

First, Wipfli recommended performing a culture survey to help CAPCIL measure, understand and shape its culture. The Wipfli team also held focus groups and employee interviews to further provide insight into CAPCIL’s culture. Once they had the information they needed, Wipfli walked CAPCIL leadership through the results. Leaders learned that the ideal culture they wanted and the culture they had were actually the same, but only at the leadership level. Understanding what employees below the leadership level needed to find their roles fulfilling allowed CAPCIL to then work with Wipfli on developing a roadmap for change.

Once they executed on this roadmap, CAPCIL began to see incredible results. Before bringing Wipfli on board, CAPCIL had been retaining around 73% of its employees. After completing the organizational performance project and implementing the action-planning roadmap, CAPCIL’s retention rate shot up to 90%.

CAPCIL was also able to streamline its hiring process. Before, CAPCIL took between 30 and 90 days to find candidates, place them and fulfill compliance requirements. Now that the organization is starting out with strategic knowledge of who would best fit a position and why, the average time has fallen to just nine days.

Hometown Trolley was facing two distinct challenges. First, years of working with small, local IT providers had led to an inconsistent technology experience and chronic network problems. Second, the organization’s shop floor was working off of manual, paper-based processes that were time-consuming and required duplicate entry between systems. Hometown Trolley came to Wipfli to create a more robust and consistent technology experience.

Wipfli’s first step was to outline Hometown Trolley’s challenges and build out a three-year technology roadmap focused on stabilizing and then improving the organization’s technology systems and network. Under this roadmap, Wipfli redid the physical cabling, replaced outdated network equipment, implemented wireless internet for the shop floor, replaced employee PCs and implemented a consistent setup for those PCs.

Wipfli also migrated production data to Microsoft Office 365, Teams and SharePoint and implemented the use of tablet devices. This new system allows shop floor personnel to enter and access information on their tablet. A large monitor on the shop floor now displays the production schedule, further giving employees easy access to critical information that makes their day-to-day jobs easier and faster.

With Microsoft cloud technology, Hometown Trolley has been able to eliminate duplicate data entry and give employees access to the information they need, when they need it. Now that production staff can pull up drawings, instructions, inspection sheets and other information they need right from their tablets, a full two days of processing has been eliminated for the registration office per trolley built.

Notably, this transformation happened in only a year’s time. Although the roadmap laid out a three-year plan, Hometown Trolley was committed to investing in the technology it needed to keep pace with its growth and improve efficiency and productivity. Because of this, Wipfli was able to complete the majority of the roadmap’s three phases in just one year.

The story of Wipfli Connect for Contractors is a story of people, resilience and dedication.

Over the past 30 years, technology has been fairly stagnant in the construction industry when it comes to business operations. But Wipfli has been able to work with contractors to get past traditional tech barriers. We created Wipfli Connect for Contractors, a technology platform powered by Microsoft that is revolutionizing how contractors do business.

We started with people. We invested thousands of hours talking to hundreds of contractors. We explored every roadblock to success. Every core reason for not succeeding. We talked to all types of workers.
We then dug into the guts of all the programs contractors use: Microsoft Dynamics 365, Procore, Concur, Viewpoint, etc. We stared at stacks of Excel spreadsheets. Once we knew the people, the platforms and the business needs, we went to work.

And that’s where resilience comes in. We didn’t settle with our first idea. We worked solutions for contractors for 10 years, refining repeatedly until we had something that would be a game-changer for them. And then we launched Wipfli Connect for Contractors.

We saw immediate success with clients. We had turned imagination into innovation, overcoming all those barriers. Yet we didn’t stop. Our dedication and passion for our project has us continually innovating it. We learn from each new client. We incorporate their ideas and deploy upgrades.

Every client who tells us they’ve increased profits, cut hours out of filing paperwork, improved their credit rating or won a big bid drives us to work better and harder for them — to continue to turn innovation into execution.

To continue growing their company and ensure future success, Allstar Holdings’ leadership team wanted to take their business strategy to the next level. They liked the robust resources Wipfli provided, so they engaged with Wipfli to do so.

After reviewing strategy documents and conducting executive interviews, it was time to move into the core strategy-planning workshops with the leadership team. Typically, these consist of Wipfli facilitating full-day, in-person strategy sessions. However, everything was set to kick off just as COVID-19 started to trigger stay-at-home orders across the country. Conducting strategy sessions in person was no longer an option.

With all the technology available in today’s working world, the decision was made for Wipfli to facilitate a series of half-day core strategy workshops over a video conferencing tool, which would still allow for collaboration and encourage the team participation necessary to have everyone’s voice heard in building out the plan.

Allstar’s CEO, Grady Stephens, was somewhat skeptical about conducting two full-day strategy sessions remotely, but he trusted Wipfli enough to move forward with the virtual facilitation. After the first session, Wipfli asked Allstar executives to rate the effectiveness. Feedback was surprisingly positive given this new territory they’d entered. Stephens said, “It went better than I could have imagined.” The executives were optimistic about the next session and even eager to get back to it. There were far fewer side conversations than typical of in-person sessions, so the video conferencing helped allow everyone to further contribute, share their individual ideas and collaborate to make significant progress in each session.

As a result of the workshops, and in a relatively short period of time, Allstar’s executives have updated the company’s mission, vision and values; identified their strategic pillars and priorities; and begun building out action plans.

Significantly, they were so pleased with how the virtual half-day sessions were going and the progress they were making that Stephens made the decision to add two more half-day sessions. Leaders felt Wipfli brought not only expertise in strategic planning to help guide them but also kept the team on track through a professionally facilitated, collaborative approach. Having Wipfli available to lead extra sessions so they could continue building out their action plans gave them further confidence that they were making the right decisions and setting their business up for success.

As a certifying body for agronomists, the American Society of Agronomy (ASA) maintains a report on its website that provides critical information to individuals working toward certification credits. However, during peak season, the report was taking several minutes just to open, which led to frustrated phone calls to the ASA asking for help. At the same time, ASA’s master compliance report — which contained a massive amount of data — struggled with its own performance challenges to the point that it was unusable.

ASA approached Wipfli for help, and the Wipfli team determined that Microsoft’s powerful, cloud-based Power BI solution would solve its reporting challenges by allowing the ability to flex to peak-season query needs.

Wipfli also saw user-experience challenges with ASA’s report. The team worked to make it user-friendly and easier to read. This included restructuring content and using color codes, icons and easy thumbs up or down to indicate reporting compliance.

With the new reports up and running — and able to open instantly — ASA has received fantastic feedback from its certified individuals. Because the reports are much easier to read, ASA now gets fewer phone calls from users seeking clarification. Fewer phone calls means ASA employees have more time in their day-to-day to focus on strategic priorities. Plus, the redesigned reporting is mobile-friendly, enabling agronomists on the road to log in from their phone.

Beyond operational reports, Wipfli has helped ASA replace mundane manual tasks with automation. Through integrations between Power BI and Dynamics CRM, email lists are now ready in just minutes. This has saved over four days of work every month for the employee tasked with emailing certified individuals their statuses and notes.

As a service organization handling sensitive data, Cross Insurance TPA has an annual SOC audit performed in order to provide its customers with assurance that its processes and controls are sound and effective. The organization has engaged Wipfli to perform the audit for many years.

Part of Wipfli’s value-add is going above and beyond just performing the audit. Wipfli also provides organizations with recommendations outside the SOC report for how they can improve in a range of different areas. In Cross’s case, Wipfli’s recommendations helped the organization transition to paperless workflows, implement more system controls and reduce manual controls, and implement technology that allows remote access, making it much easier for employees to work from anywhere.

With the strong relationship that Cross and Wipfli have built, Cross trusts that the Wipfli team’s recommendations will improve its processes and increase efficiency. Because it has implemented key recommendations and best practices, it has not only put itself ahead of the curve but also made itself much more resilient as a business and organization.

That couldn’t be more evident than in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The organization transitioned seamlessly to remote work, helping to reduce stress on employees and ensure business continuity.