Arexo
A Pragmatic Approach to Business Agility

Business agility, traditionally limited to IT or software development departments, has now become more pervasive across product management, human resources, and portfolio management segments. Organizations today, both large and small, are racing to implement agile principles and techniques in their projects and drive business agility across all departments. In the wake of countless agile methodologies to follow, what agility-seeking enterprises now need is a way to leverage agile values and principles for increased productivity and workflow improvements. On par with this requirement, Stephane Rondal, a seasoned IT consultant backed by rich software development expertise was quick to seize the opportunity, thus laying the cornerstone for Arexo.

At the helm of Arexo—an IT consultancy and services firm—as its founder and CEO, Rondal guides his team to fulfill the company’s mission of helping enterprises grasp the value of business agility, and enhance their productivity. “Numerous organizations following agile methodologies today neither understand the agile mindset, nor its values and principles, hindering the harvest of its benefits,” states Rondal. Arexo follows a pragmatic approach to offer customized industry-specific software solutions, and help clients meet their agile transformation goals. Be it a faster time to market, improved quality or increased velocity, Arexo covers it all. The Arexo team goes the extra mile in the business agility space to educate its clients on the benefits of agile transformation.

To begin with, Arexo’s highly-skilled software engineering and development team meticulously observes and understands the clients’ workflow, and draws a set of pragmatic recommendations in accordance with their contexts.

The company leverages its decade-long experience and deep-level expertise in diverse business contexts, departments, and environments to gain a better understanding of the clients’ requirements. “If a client already has an agile methodology in place, we attend their planning meetings, and interview different stakeholders, participants, and thought leaders to assess their current workflows and challenges, and identify opportunities for improvement,” adds Rondal. Taking into consideration the clients’ business agility goals and maintaining long-term relationships, Arexo tailors its recommendations in that direction.

Arexo’s uniqueness stems from its utilization of different techniques—from performing visual management to introducing a world of different facilitations for agile transformation. The company enables the clients to ‘become independent’, and implement the set recommendations by themselves if they choose to. “We periodically check how our recommendations turn out for our clients, run diagnostics on our projects, observe the progress, and spot opportunities for further improvements,” Rondal says.

Recently, Arexo assisted one of the top 10 banks in the world to achieve agile transformation within their trading department, which was tied down with repetitive validation tasks. These validation tasks were legal requirements that comprised running a program to check results, building compliance reports, and studying input and output data. However, handling these repetitive processes took a toll on the trading team, and prolonged the report filling time to over two weeks. After training the trading team to achieve an agile mindset, Arexo mapped their value feed and represented it on a board, enabling the trading department to procure a comprehensive visualization of their processes. This enabled the bank to effectively streamline their processes and fill reports within a week. “Apart from our role in the project, the client’s zeal to experiment with the system, and understand the outcomes of implementing an agile mindset in the long-run was fundamental to its success,” recalls Rondal.

With such stories highlighting Arexo’s successful journey across Belgium, the company maintains its quality of service and aims to extend its outreach in the neighboring countries. Furthermore, Arexo leverages its training initiative—Agile Workshop Tour (AWT)—to share its agile experience with a global audience.