ERP Implementation for Construction Company

Executive Summary

Our customer is a 100 year old, billion-dollar US based Construction Company providing an extensive selection of bridge, drainage, earth stabilization & storm water solutions. The customer had acquired a number of other companies over past decade and thus had over 40 different applications. ennovate’s engagement with the customer began with supporting their software applications on Microsoft .NET technology.

Gradually, ennovate’s team demonstrated their expertise on Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Great Plains (GP) software through pilot projects assigned by the customer and won the confidence of the customer to customize their existing CRM and ERP systems. ennovate was also instrumental in saving significant cost in technology investment, by suggesting appropriate Business Intelligence tools for customer requirements.

For past 2 years, ennovate has served as a technology offshoring wing of this construction giant by offering complete IT services in Microsoft technologies like .Net, Biztalk Server, SharePoint Server, PerformancePoint Server and Microsoft Dynamics CRM & Great Plains.

The Customer

• Our customer offers a wide array of innovative solutions for both initial development and rehabilitation of existing structures and sites. Their involvement with products and applications is founded on a century of research and practical field experience. Their products provide effective site solutions for projects with a variety of loading conditions, foundation requirements, soil and water environments as well as varied installation demands

The Challenge

• Our customer had acquired several companies over past decade and had accounting & financial data coming from many different applications. General ledger data coming from different applications in different format. Hence, it was difficult for customer to compile financial reports like P & L statements, Balance Sheet
• Maintaining and supporting multiple financial & accounting systems from these acquisitions was also a costly affair for them
• They wanted uniformity in presentation and processing financial details across the board
• ERP implementation in its own was not sufficient to take care of all requirements. Hence, they wanted to have supporting applications and reports as well. They also wanted to have ERP system talk with other systems like data warehouse and CRM system

The Solution

• We implemented ERP system with Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains (GP) V10 for financial, manufacturing and accounting needs of the customer
• We introduced automated processes for gathering data from all systems and presenting it to ERP system for customer to get financial statements without any manual efforts
• We studied and migrated legacy applications along with data to Microsoft Dynamics GP with minimum downtime and without loss of information
• We developed support applications to automate more business functions and requirements of our customer. Some of these applications include:
  
  • Mekorma Check Printing Solution: Writing checks and offsetting them against multiple invoices of a vendor was manual process for our customer. It was time consuming and prone to human error. We implemented and customized Mekorma MICR to overcome these problems.With this solution in place, ~200 checks can be printed in a day without any errors. Our customization also enabled them to cash on early discount and other opportunities
  • SafePay solution for security: We implemented and customized SafePay solution, which automatically transmits details of payment transactions in the format required by bank. Person in-charge at the bank can validate the checks against these details before paying them. This reduced the chances of fraudulent transactions
  • Other support systems: To save more manual efforts, we also developed and integrated other support systems for GP. These systems read/write data directly to/from GP database
    • TMS Logistic integrated with Sales Order Processing in GP
    • Bills Of Material (BOM) integrated with Inventory/Sales Order Processing in GP
    • Labour Collection integrated with Manufacturing in GP
• Other than standard GP reports, we did extensive customization in MO-RTM and Purchase Order reports with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). We also customized Smart List Builder reports generated from Microsoft Dynamics GP to meet customer requirements
• We used Scribe Software to enable Microsoft Dynamics GP talk with other systems like CRM and data warehouse for BI. Our automated solution to push the order directly from CRM solution to ERP saved ~90% manual work

The Technology

• Microsoft .NET
• Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains (GP)
• Scribe Software
• Mekorma MICR
• Database: SQL Server 2005

The Benefits

• ~90% of manual efforts saved in check printing. It reduced number of waste and slash checks significantly. With Safepay system in place chances of fraudulent transactions also decreased to bare minimum.
• Top management gained better visibility with data consolidation and uniformity in presentation across divisions in the organization
• Our implementation of support systems helped our customer save on licensing costs
• Our customer could save on cost of maintaining and licensing legacy applications and systems, as we gradually replaced them with GP

Customer Testimonial

"ennovate has done an excellent job in understanding a business finance issue, designing a solution, and planning for the future, resulting in many game-changing successes for us in ERP. Thanks to them on their help with this project in expertise of the data warehouse and I know that it has already paid dividends in supplying me at least with accurate information across all ledgers."

- Head Controller, Accounts Payable, Construction company