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Dean Fischer is President of West Monroe Partners and was one of the company's founders in April 2002.
West Monroe Partners was founded largely as a spin-off of experienced Arthur Andersen professionals whose strengths and expertise lay in designing and delivering complex business and technology solutions that enable strategic success. Dean believes that organizations, today, are looking for a unique and different type of partner -- one that understands the depth and multitude of challenges and opportunities facing them and can address those issues through a blend of business and deep technology understanding. Dean has more than 26 years of experience helping clients respond quickly, cost-effectively, and successfully to issues such as revenue growth, continued cost reduction, and improvement and expansion of customer and supplier relationships -- all amid increasing pressures to justify technology-based projects.
Dean began his career with Arthur Andersen in the financial and accounting side of the business. He later began to practice in Andersen's technology consulting groups, advising clients on matters of business strategy, technology architectures and designs, business process change and improvement, technology implementations, and business operations. He also served as the partner in charge of global new service development and incubation. After leaving Andersen in 2000, he led a software and services company that developed and distributed business-to-business integration software and services. That company-s products and services enabled and facilitated radically different relationships between suppliers and customers throughout the value chain.
His skill set is uniquely diverse as he has practiced in a variety of disciplines -- financial and accounting, legal, operational, and emerging technologies. Furthermore, he has a reputation as being a creative, entrepreneurial, and collaborative executive.
Highlights
Dean began his career in Arthur Andersen's financial statement audit and assurance practice, focusing largely on manufacturing companies. During this period, he served as the audit partner on Brunswick Corporation's defense aerospace manufacturing operations and as the audit and regulatory specialist for several other clients, including GTE, Zenith, and US Sprint.
Dean's accounting and financial education and experience led him to participate in the start-up of Andersen's Litigation Consulting practice, where he assisted clients with a variety of commercial litigation matters involving damages claims, etc. He also was involved extensively in the development and growth of Andersen's Government Contracts Consulting practice, where he became known as a national luminary in the area of complex cost, pricing, and economic regulatory matters involving large Federal government procurements. During this period, Dean performed substantial government contract consulting engagements for Motorola Inc., Brunswick Corporation, US Sprint, and a variety of industries such as metal alloys, environmental treatment and cleanup, manufacturing, engineering, aerospace, and technology research.
Dean has worked extensively with major Washington, D.C., law firms, including Steptoe & Johnson; Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson; and Arnold & Porter. He has advised clients in the area of international tax disputes (Section 482) and antitrust litigation and has testified as an accounting expert.
Dean's expertise in the Federal procurement arena introduced him to the complex computing and technology world in the late 1980s. He led a joint Sprint and Andersen team of more than 120 people that competed for, negotiated, and won the FTS 2000 Federal telecommunications contract for Sprint. The preparation of this proposal involved the complete design and pricing of a state-of-the market telecommunications infrastructure to support full voice, data, video, packet switching, and the then-emerging ISDN services to the Federal government under a ten year contract.
Dean ultimately assumed leadership and operating responsibility for these consulting practices for Andersen, growing them from approximately 200 professionals to more than 600 in 1995.
Dean remained active in the systems and technology practices of Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting (Accenture) from the late 1980s until he assumed full-time responsibility in 1995 for incubating Arthur Andersen's Advanced Technologies Consulting business. This consulting practice, based in the firm's U.S. Central Region, grew from a start-up practice to more than 200 personnel over the next four years. In addition to leading Andersen's Central Region business, Dean worked with the Managing Partner of Andersen's global Business Consulting practice on new service development and its technology and Internet consulting businesses.
In late 2000, Dean joined EC Outlook, an industry-leading provider of B2B Integration Services and Software. EC Outlook was funded by Venrock, the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family and represented Venrock's largest single investment at the time. He had responsibility for the company's entire Columbus, Ohio, operation, which housed virtually all the operations -- from software development to client services to operations to sales to development of strategic partnerships. EC Outlook was enormously successful during this period, acquiring and serving customers such as Bristol Myers Squibb, BASF, DuPont, Panasonic, CIBA, Sun Microsystems and the natural gas trading operations of Enron -- Enron Online. |
