Building Delivery Systems at Brightpath Software

Brightpath Software develops workflow automation tools for mid-market financial services companies. Founded in Round Rock in 2012, the company had grown to 120 employees and $28M in ARR by 2025 — but growth was exposing serious operational cracks.

Implementation projects were consistently running over timeline and over budget. The sales team was signing deals faster than delivery could absorb them, and there was no reliable way to forecast capacity or project profitability. Customer satisfaction scores were declining, particularly during the 90-day post-implementation period when clients expected the product to be fully operational.

The COO, Marcus Reid, had been hired nine months earlier to fix operations, but inherited a delivery organization with no documented processes, inconsistent project management practices across teams, and a culture of heroic individual effort rather than systematic execution. The CEO was frustrated that revenue growth was not translating to profit growth — margins had compressed four points over the prior eighteen months despite strong demand.

Brightpath needed more than a project management tool upgrade. They needed an operating model for delivery that could scale with the sales pipeline — one that connected scoping, staffing, execution, and financial visibility into a single system.

Solvane deployed a cross-functional team to map Brightpath's end-to-end delivery workflow — from signed contract through implementation, UAT, go-live, and post-launch support. We shadowed project managers, interviewed engineers and consultants, and analyzed six months of project data to identify where time and margin were being lost.

The diagnostic revealed three root causes. First, scoping was inconsistent — sales commitments frequently exceeded what delivery could absorb without overtime. Second, there was no centralized view of team capacity, so project assignments were made reactively. Third, handoffs between implementation and customer success were informal, leading to repeated work and client frustration during the first 90 days post-launch.

Over a ten-week design phase, we co-created solutions with Brightpath's leadership and frontline teams. We built a standardized scoping template tied to effort estimates by product module. We designed a capacity planning model that projected utilization eight weeks forward based on signed pipeline and existing commitments. And we documented a formal handoff protocol between implementation and CS with defined deliverables, timelines, and quality checkpoints.

We piloted the new workflows on three active projects before rolling out company-wide. Solvane facilitated weekly pilot reviews to capture friction points and refine the process. We also partnered with Brightpath's CFO to build a project profitability dashboard showing margin by project, client segment, and team — giving leadership visibility they had never had before.

The final phase included training all project managers and team leads on the new systems, updating the company's project management tooling configuration, and establishing a biweekly operations review meeting with a standing agenda focused on capacity, margin, and delivery quality.

• On-time delivery — Improved from 61% to 89% of projects delivered on schedule within two quarters of rollout
• Project margins — Average project gross margin increased from 52% to 63% through better scoping and utilization management
• Utilization — Consultant utilization increased from 68% to 81% without adding headcount
• Client satisfaction — NPS for implementation experience rose from 34 to 58
• Repeat work — Post-implementation rework hours decreased by 47%, freeing capacity for new projects
• Forecast accuracy — Revenue forecast accuracy improved from +/- 22% to +/- 8% quarter-over-quarter

Brightpath's COO reported that the capacity planning model alone changed how the company sold — sales now had confidence in commit dates, and delivery stopped being the bottleneck that limited growth.