EPM consulting · 42 consultants · Anaplan, Board, PigmentHow DataValue Strategy delivers EPM projects 20% faster with Dust.
DataValue Strategy (DVS), a 42-consultant EPM consulting firm, deployed Dust across the full project lifecycle with Idoption's support — from a structured pilot to a company-wide rollout, with 100% of its 42-person team onboarding Dust as a mandatory tool in September 2026.
DataValue Strategy
DataValue Strategy (DVS) is a pure-play EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) consulting firm founded in 2019. In seven years it has grown to 42 consultants, 30+ active clients and 300+ projects delivered. Its specialty: helping companies manage financial and operational performance through platforms like Anaplan, Board and Pigment — from business scoping to solution integration and long-term maintenance.
Operating in a 100% Microsoft environment (Teams, SharePoint), DVS recently expanded internationally with a Casablanca office as part of a broader offshoring strategy. The firm is steered by a team of associates, including Julien Canonge and Nicolas Langlais, who both took an early lead on its AI transformation.
What makes DVS a compelling case is its structural consistency: every EPM engagement follows a repeatable methodology — scoping workshops, design documents, training guides, go-live handovers. That predictability is exactly what makes AI such a natural fit. What was once the firm's greatest time sink became its biggest opportunity.
What was holding them back, before Idoption.
A firm under growing productivity pressure
EPM consulting is a sector where clients don't just want results — they want them faster, year after year. For DVS, that wasn't a distant concern; it was the reality shaping every renewal conversation and every new proposal.
Clients explicitly expect efficiency gains from their consulting partners on an annual basis. The answer couldn't simply be to hire more people: DVS needed a way to produce more without proportionally growing headcount.
The deliverable bottleneck
The core of the problem was structural. Consultants spent a significant portion of their time on deliverables that were critical but formulaic — meeting notes after workshops, functional design documents, training guides for go-live handovers. Valuable work, but work that followed a repeatable pattern every time.
Meeting notes: after each client workshop, a consultant spent hours writing a formal summary, then sent it one or two days later. Multiplied across the many weeks of workshops in an EPM project, the time drain becomes substantial.
Training documentation: each user and admin guide took 3 to 4 man-days to produce — on multi-module projects, a full week of consultant time just for documentation. The newsletter, meanwhile, required several consultants to coordinate across a full week of production.
Meanwhile the market was shifting: RFPs were beginning to include explicit questions about how firms use AI. DVS had a perspective on AI — but not yet a concrete, operational answer to point to.
What we shipped.
Why Dust won the evaluation: multi-LLM flexibility and native Microsoft integration
DVS discovered Dust at a breakfast event organized by Idoption. What followed wasn't a decision made on a demo alone — it was peer validation: Idoption introduced them to other EPM consulting firms already using Dust, whose concrete results and workflows proved decisive.
Beyond multi-LLM flexibility, two other criteria mattered: the ease of building and iterating on agents, and native Microsoft integration. DVS's Teams and SharePoint environment was already its operating backbone — Dust connects to it directly, inheriting Microsoft's access governance automatically, with no separate permission layer to manage.
What convinced us was the multi-LLM approach offered by Dust. We didn't find any other solution on the market with an equivalent offer.
A phased, ambassador-led rollout
DVS didn't open Dust to all 42 consultants on day one. They started with 8 expert ambassadors, hand-selected and trained by Idoption, who tested and validated four high-impact use cases across the project lifecycle. Governance rules were established before broader access was granted.
The four priority use cases: meeting notes (from workshop transcript to same-day client delivery) · functional and technical design documents (structured specs from transcripts) · training documentation (user and admin guides for go-live handovers) · commercial proposals (first-draft generation from RFP inputs).
Today around ten consultants are active users — a deliberate design decision, not a friction problem. The full 42-person team onboards in September 2026, with Dust becoming part of the standard toolkit for every new hire.
At the structural level, DVS formalized a practice that emerged from the pilot: one mandatory Dust Pod per project. Every team centralizes transcripts, documentation and agent outputs in a shared Pod — the knowledge lives in one place, accessible to the whole team regardless of who was in the room.
The platform is intuitive enough to make you want to explore it and quickly see results. These are concepts that sound intimidating — LLM, agent — but you take control of them rapidly.
What we measured.
Quantified impact across every use case
Meeting notes: ~70% time saved on writing, with same-day client delivery (previously 1 to 2 days).
Training documentation: ~50% time saved — from 3–4 man-days to ~1.5–2 man-days per guide.
Functional design documents: gains described as “very significant”, with quantification in progress as full deployment scales.
Newsletter production: ~80% time saved — from a week involving several consultants to a ready-to-review draft in one day.
On meeting notes, I'd say we save nearly 70% of writing time using an agent. And there's also a quality dimension: the client doesn't wait one or two days for their notes — they can have them immediately.
From “we use AI” to “here's exactly how”
Beyond time savings on individual tasks, something more strategic happened: AI became a topic in client conversations, and DVS now has concrete answers. RFPs explicitly ask how consulting partners use AI — DVS can point to specific agents, documented workflows and measurable time savings. In a market where most firms are still figuring out their strategy, that's a meaningful edge.
The quality improvements are as tangible as the time savings: cleaner first drafts — better grammar, more consistent structure and terminology — mean fewer client review rounds and faster project progress.
An unanticipated outcome: knowledge continuity. With one Pod per project, a consultant joining mid-engagement can immediately access all relevant documentation, transcripts and outputs. The learning curve shrinks; continuity is built into the system by design.
Today this is a real differentiator in conversations with our clients. We've moved from theory to practice. When clients ask how we use AI in our projects — we have a concrete answer.
What's next for DataValue Strategy.
Scaling to 42 consultants and launching three new expert agents
By September 2026 the full team will be onboarded: structured training sessions — tool presentations, live agent demos, hands-on practice, governance rules — followed by use-case-specific coaching for different project roles.
Three agents in development go live alongside the broader rollout: expert solution agents — one dedicated Dust agent per EPM platform (Anaplan, Board, Pigment), each connected to full product documentation · a TMA maintenance agent — trained on the full history of support tickets for EPM applications inherited from third-party firms, getting smarter with every resolution · a knowledge-continuity system to capture and preserve senior consultant expertise.
A new daily reflex has taken hold: before starting anything, consultants ask whether Dust can help. New use cases have emerged organically beyond the initial four — contract analysis, RFP go/no-go support, technology watch on platform updates, scenario studies.
Dust, I think, is the main innovation driver for the firm this year.