Background
As any developer will know, essential to any change in use of a piece of land or building is an accurate plan drawn to an appropriate scale showing all the features relevant to the development. Severn Partnership provide topographical surveys and 3D modelling to engineers and architects and employ a team of highly skilled surveyors who use the latest survey instrumentation to provide high quality plans for a wide range of projects. Their projects can involve one team working for a day on a small rural building site to four teams working for two months in a busy city centre. Whatever the project the need to manage the time spent by highly trained personnel and to understand how best to deploy high value equipment is critical to controlling costs.
The Problem
As Nick Blenkarn, Financial Director at Severn Partnership explains “We have spent the last four years trying to streamline the business, update processes, get rid of duplicate effort and get information easily ‘to hand’. We needed to encourage staff to think about project profitability and cost savings. Sage Coretime has helped us to do exactly that. We now operate a profit share scheme along with bonuses to encourage staff to adopt a different mindset and think about ‘best use of time’.”
The Solution
Getting control of resources
Describing how they use the system, Nick said “We have 25 users, surveyors and admin staff and we use it as a mini-CRM system. We can monitor working hours, we can work out weekend and night rate overtime, analyse project profitability and bring work in progress and financial figures one step in front of Sage. Coretime integrates fully with our Sage 50 accounts systems and we have had excellent telephone support from Onesys, I cannot fault it. It means we’re not having to request reports from the accounts team and we have more control over our resources whereas we seldom used the data from our old system as it was a good way off real-time. In short you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Coretime has improved reporting out 100%.”
Streamlining Processes
“Other benefits to the business have been how it has affected some of our processes. We’ve needed to focus more on accurately logging items on the system which is a good discipline in itself. It means we can highlight those projects that destroy the profitability but more importantly we can pinpoint the elements which are affecting profitability, whether that is surveyors who are not sufficiently focussed on managing time or unexpected costs which have been generated during the course of the project. We’ve streamlined how we manage timesheet data entry, centralised client and project information and we now have a clear picture of those projects that are really good news for the business as well as data to ensure we can continually improve. ”
The Outcome
“As a ‘non surveying item’ this was a big investment, especially at this economic time but the rewards in terms of project profitability and the ability to get quality data to help us to deliver our projects on time and on budget for our customers will pay dividends. If we can ensure a design team are meeting their key objectives, we are confident we will get a return on our investment by winning repeat business. It’s early days yet, but the signs are that Coretime will enable us to give a faster response to our customers and ensure we have ‘cutting edge’ kit in the right place for the right amount of time. Effective control of our resources means more satisfied customers and more repeat business.
Onesys are the number one supplier of Sage Coretime in the UK with over 400 client installations.
Contact Onesys for more information on how Sage Coretime can help your Surveying business. We offer a full consultation and free trial of the software so that you understand exactly how Sage Coretime will help your business.