LEADERSHIP

David Den Boer founded Column5 Consulting in 2005. A dedicated professional services practitioner and entrepreneur, he has applied his significant technical delivery experience and broad experience providing solutions across a wide variety of industries — and raising the standards for what success means within EPM. As a founding principal with the launch of Column5, David sought to extend the focus of EPM beyond just implementing technology, assembling a team of business process visionaries and senior product talent with unmatched ability to deliver world-class EPM solutions.

Under David´s leadership, Column5 has evolved beyond its reputation for technically superior solutions to be an influential global provider of high—value EPM solutions. His prior experience includes consulting experience as Director of Services at OutlookSoft from 2000 to 2005.

Ian Thurbon, a highly experienced executive with an extensive leadership track record, joined Column5 as CEO in early 2018. Ian has spent nearly 30 years in the IT and software industry, and his experience spans roles with start-up companies across systems integrators, software companies, and managed services firms. Most recently, Ian served as President of Business & Decision, North America.  He specializes in helping companies to break through growth inflection points and taking them to the next level. As CEO of Column5, Ian will continue the company’s drive toward consistent evolution and innovation to keep pace with its sophisticated customer base.

Mike Sullivan is a seasoned professional with more than 14 years of combined experience in requirements gathering, needs analysis, system design, solution delivery, project management, rapid application development, application optimization and knowledge transfer related to OLAP and business intelligence applications.

Mike oversees Column5´s regional service managers. His skill set combines strong business acumen and deep technical skills, which enables the translation of business requirements into system design and innovative solutions. He also has a longstanding history of successful implementations and satisfied customers across multiple industries—more than 100 with SAP BPC alone. Prior to joining the company, Mike was a Services Director with OutlookSoft, where he worked from 2000 to 2006.

Steve Sussman oversees Column5´s global sales, business development and marketing initiatives. He has more than 20 years of experience in the EPM industry, including 6 years at Hyperion and over 5 years at OutlookSoft/SAP in sales and marketing related roles.

Steve delivers a wealth of experience through his highly educational, consultative approach. His unique ability to partner with visionary executives from a who´s who of leading global organizations has played a vital role in helping them transform their companies to achieve new heights. Under Steve´s direction, Column5´s sales team focuses on educating clients to appreciate sources of value, rather than strictly emphasizing technical specifications. In this way, Steve´s contributions reach far beyond sales — he has served as a career counselor and collaborator for many company leaders, and helped them achieve personal advancement by driving business results from their successful EPM initiatives.

David Jones has spent 30 years working in the EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) space. He is a Chartered Accountant and expert in financial management and EPM. He works with organisations to design and implement, high performance, agile and reliable performance management solutions. He has particular expertise in financial reporting and fast close, integrated planning and forecasting and EPM transformation business case development. David had a leadership role in PwC’s EPM practice for many years but joined Column5 4 years ago to focus on delivering EPM transformation with SAP EPM and to drive growth for Column5 in the EMEA market. He has worked with multiple iconic clients in the UK, Europe and the Middle East across multiple sectors including pharmaceutical, automotive, natural resources, retail, manufacturing, consumer goods and financial services. He has worked with many of the European Close Cycle Ranking leaders to achieve sustained and effective fast close characteristics. He is Chairman of EPM International and leads our global EPM research activities, including the EPMi Close Cycle Rankings and the EPMi Corporate Centre EPM process benchmark and writes regularly on the topic of best practice EPM.

Charles began his SAP BPC career with exposure to the software in 2001 with OutlookSoft, the original creator of BPC, and worked at SAP until 2008 when he came over to Column5. He is certified as both an Application and Technical Consultant for the software, having performed over 1000 technical implementations of the BOBJ Analytics software products across every different business vertical worldwide over the past 18 years. He currently runs the Global Technical Services group at Column5 with a team of SAP Analytics (EPM/EIM/BI/HANA/NW/BW/MS) resources, all of whom have been the Subject Matter Experts (SME) in the numerous areas of the aforementioned software including NetWeaver, HANA, and Microsoft technology stacks.

Jamie Allen has over 20 Years of Technology and Marketing experience which started at Saatchi and Saatchi working on Toyota and Lexus to a client list that is a literal who's who of global brands. He brings a combination of Events Branding and Technical expertise to Column5.  

Jennifer Harlan directs the EPM Academy, Column5’s formal training practice. She has over 20 years of experience in the EPM industry, including 8 years at Hyperion and 4 years at OutlookSoft/SAP. Jennifer’s skillset combines innovative curriculum development and engaging training delivery, leveraging best-in-class tools to develop customer-centric and industry-specific EPM training for consumption via on site classroom, virtual classroom, and online independent eLearning. She has developed EPM training programs for all audiences and industries, as well as delivering over 400 dynamic live training sessions.

Scott has over 18 years of experience selling, implementing, designing and leading Enterprise Performance Management systems across a wide array of industries. He manages the Delivery practice for the Western United States, comprising of 30+ consultants and 12-15 active engagements at any given time. He provides oversight, design expertise, hands-on consulting and customer leadership. Scott is able to provide both specific product and design expertise based on leading practices and can provide a vision for customers on planning and executing an EPM strategy.

Darrell is an MA in Computer Science from Cambridge University in the UK and has over 25 years’ experience in IT and Project Management of which over 13 years has been focused on EPM. His initial EPM involvement was in the design and development of EPM software, in particular PlusPlan and CLIME from Coopers & Lybrand Deloitte. He subsequently moved into a consulting role and now has over 20 years consulting experience, including implementing EPM (primarily SAP BPC, SAP FC, Oracle Hyperion and CLIME) and ERP (SAP & Oracle) in a variety of blue chip organisations across the UK and Europe. This included working with clients on multiple group reporting, planning, forecasting  and budgeting applications and also the development of a product costing solution for international transfer pricing. More recently, Darrell has also worked and consulted as an Enterprise Architect and Project Manager for a number of UK and International Column5 clients, including customers in the Oil & Gas, Consumer Products, Security services and Automotive industries. Darrell is passionate about EPM and the value it can bring to any corporate organisation when implemented well.

Charlie Stoops focuses on guiding customers through mutual evaluation cycles that help customers mitigate risks and maximize value driven through their EPM initiatives. He also oversees North American business development and sales operations. In this capacity, his effort is concentrated on continuous improvement to Column5’s guided discovery processes leading up to engagement. These processes are designed to drive customer success by consistently reducing risk, highlighting best practices, sharing experiences and accumulated wisdom from other customers and Column5 experts, and ensuring customer initiatives are oriented around high impact sources of value. Charlie has over 5 years of experience guiding customers on setting the stage for successful analytics initiatives.