Construction

Case Study

Building / Construction Company – Business Improvement Project

I was asked to complete a two-day business review of a $30M turnover building company that specialised in steel-clad barns, garages and warehouses.  The main issues that the business needed to be resolve included:

• Up to a 3-month delay in being able to complete monthly client invoices.
• Up to a 3-month delay in being able to complete the monthly accounts owing to the delays in the processing of invoices.
• Invoice inaccuracies once they had been finally processed which then needed correcting prior to their issue.

I then spent the afternoon going through the business’s processing systems with the IT Manager.

During the review of the processing systems, I identified that the project system was not configured correctly, and the default was set to processing invoices to internal sales rather than external sales.  95% of the business’s sales were external.  After discussion and testing with the IT Manager a call was made to the software development company to see how difficult it would be to correct this issue.  The answer was less than one-hour of developer time.

The next day I spent time with both the Production and Head Project Manager to discuss their issues with the system.  There main issues were:

• Duplication of effort to produce quotes and costings.
• Inaccuracies when processing costings to quotes and invoices.

A review with each of them with their prospective parts of the system revealed:

• Major input and information screens were towards the end of the process instead of at the start of the process.
• Information and costs had to often be entered multiple times.
• Data dropped out during the process.

After then discussing these issues with the IT Manager it became obvious that having the major input screens to the back of the process was causing the issues.  This was confirmed by the software development company.  They also advised that the time to correct these issues was approximately one-hour and the developer would fix the issues within the next two working days.

Two days of my time plus approximately two-hours of developer time corrected 95% of the business’s system issues and highlighted how to resolve the remaining 5% of issues.

For more information on what help I can provide call John Raffaelli on (021) 625-871 or alternatively go to our website by clicking here https://intotheblue.co.nz