Kaufman Hall Announces Acquisition of Retikal LLC, Extending Investment in Higher Education

SKOKIE, Ill. – April 3, 2017 – Kaufman Hall, a leading provider of management consulting services and enterprise performance management software, today announced the acquisition of Retikal LLC, a Portland, Oregon-based software consulting company with market leading Higher Education enterprise performance management (EPM) software development and delivery capabilities.

“It is exciting to join forces with Retikal as we expand our market reach and delivery capabilities in the Higher Education industry as part of our strategic efforts to help optimize performance and organizational decision-making for existing and future Higher Education clients,” said Tom Walsh, CEO of Kaufman Hall Software. “The forward-thinking approach of Retikal in creating impactful and highly intuitive software solution extensions is helping to bridge the gap between finance, IT, and other business and executive stakeholders within the university environment. This acquisition helps to further Kaufman Hall’s commitment to equip institutions with strategic financial management, and data-driven planning, reporting, analysis that make a true impact to the organization.”

Higher Education institutions face a changing and increasingly competitive marketplace with pressure on public funding, new market entrants, fluctuating enrollment, and tuition challenges. It is no longer an option for these institutions to manage financial plans and budgets with spreadsheets or by using outdated, inflexible software. Senior business officers need modern planning processes and tools that enable agile techniques for modeling scenarios, applying advanced analytics, and providing meaningful financial and operational reporting to improve decision making and optimize financial outcomes.

The combination of Kaufman Hall’s management consulting expertise and performance management software, with Retikal’s innovative delivery capabilities within Higher Education EPM technology services, provides a unique ability to identify and address client pain points. Higher Education has become a major growth area for Kaufman Hall, with consulting and software sales growing more than 140 percent in 2016. Additionally, the company has executed a campaign of hiring new senior-level employees with deep industry domain expertise, many having worked in executive business and finance positions within leading universities. With the addition of Retikal, the company is scaling to continue this rapid growth and provide new innovations and solutions to enable institutions to succeed in the new era of Higher Education.

“We are very excited to be joining the Kaufman Hall team,” said Adam Peaker, co-founder of Retikal. “We realized that the combination of our relationships, insights, and technology services for Higher Education can make a major, strategic impact for both Kaufman Hall clients and the industry as a whole.”

The Retikal team will immediately join the Kaufman Hall office in Portland, Oregon, aligned within product development and implementation consulting teams, to provide integrated solutions to Higher Education customers.

About Kaufman Hall

Kaufman Hall provides management consulting and software to help organizations realize sustained success amid changing market conditions. Since 1985, Kaufman Hall has been a trusted advisor to boards and executive management teams, helping them incorporate proven methods into their strategic planning and financial management processes, and quantify the financial impact of their plans and strategic decisions to consistently achieve their goals.

Kaufman Hall services use a rigorous, disciplined, and structured approach that is based on the principles of corporate finance. The breadth and integration of Kaufman Hall advisory services are unparalleled, encompassing strategy; financial and capital planning; cost transformation; treasury and capital markets management; and mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and joint ventures.

Kaufman Hall software includes the Axiom Healthcare Suite, providing sophisticated, flexible performance management solutions that empower finance professionals to analyze results, model the future, and optimize organizational decision making. Solutions for long-range planning, budgeting and forecasting, performance reporting, capital planning, and cost accounting deliver decision support, reporting, and analytics within an integrated software platform. Kaufman Hall’s Peak Software empowers healthcare organizations with clinical benchmarks, data, and analytics to provide a higher quality of care for optimized performance and improved patient outcomes.