Mechanical Equipment
Situation:
A mechanical equipment and service company was experiencing rapid growth pains and its application platform was failing them. They needed smoother, much easier access to job costing information for creating bids. In addition, they were spending significant time on manual entry and resolving the related errors. Lastly, they needed significantly better visibility and a more effective means to track bid activity, provide sales metrics and manage commissions.
Complication:
Their current accounting system, QuickBooks, did not have job costing information and was not integrated with their field service system, which drove the manual entry of the information when creating bids. At the same time, their sales team was growing at a rapid rate and they were creating their bids in Excel. It was very hard to look across all the individual Excel files to track their open bids, and almost impossible to provide sales metrics to the management team and staff. Finally, it took a very long time to determine salespeople’s commissions, and they were often inaccurate.
Resolution:
By using our fully customizable platform we were able to address their immediate concerns and lay the foundation for sustainable growth. The sales reporting and bid tracking tools we implemented were able to provide sales info quickly and easily. We then helped them implement a construction-specific accounting software package and integrated it with our platform, providing automatic, seamless integration and eliminating the error and costs inherent in manual data entry. There was a huge boost in productivity because they were now automating job setup, contract amounts, budgets, projects, and service sites into their accounting system at a click of a button. Everyone now had much faster access to the information they could rely on to do their job and help their customers.
In addition, the new system provided win-loss percentages, vendor sales volume, employee performance numbers, and of course a very accurate, fully customized, automated commission report. Sales effectiveness and efficiency increased dramatically across the board, along with the sales team’s morale.
Impact:
- Jobs were set up much more quickly, with fewer errors across their mechanical equipment and service projects
- 15% increase in sales from better salesperson tracking and focused follow up
- Margins improved by two percentage points due to better bid visibility for management
- The time to create commission reports plunged from four days to one
- Entire job and service flow improved customer satisfaction