Project costing was a challenge
Roman Burchart remembers the days when project costing at SVT was time-consuming and rife with tedium and murkiness.
“We had very limited visibility into our actual project costing,” says Burchart, the Chief Operating Officer at SVT, a company that provides the design, installation, management and service of turn-key technology solutions.
That all changed, he says, when Q360 business management software from Solutions360 was implemented and became the go-to tool that literally transformed the company’s modus operandi.
Q360 shed light on project profitability
“With Q360, we were able to accurately capture true project costs,” Burchart recalls. “Projects that we thought were coming in at an acceptable margin ended up actually being well below our target margin thresholds.”
“The visibility that Q360 provided allowed us to eliminate a multi-million dollar line of business from our portfolio.”
Right from the start with Q360, SVT was able to eliminate risky ventures, plus do away with supporting lines of business that did not provide the return the company was looking for. This also meant less capital was tied up and significant labour expenditures were avoided.
“So we were able to produce similar financial results with less top-line revenue,” Burchart explains. “This essentially allows us to do more with less and provides us with the ability to measure how much time our team is spending on specific jobs or accounts.
“Q360 has also given us the capability to develop metrics that support the trigger point for new hires.” As it turned out, Q360 became the gift that keeps on giving.
“As we became more and more comfortable with Q360, we began to realize how powerful the data is that we were populating into the system,” says Burchart.
“The amount and types of data that we have been able to analyze and leverage has grown tremendously over the years. What began as data that was used mainly for real-time business processes has grown to drive unconventional behaviors.
“We are now able to leverage this data to pull reports and dashboards in real time that we are able to display throughout our office to drive action. The sales team uses this information and can see in real time how we are tracking against our monthly sales goals.”
Moreover, he said the service team has a dashboard showing the last 25 service calls and current status of those calls.
“This allows anyone walking through the service department to see, at a glance, which customers we are working with at a given moment,” says Burchart, “and perhaps allowing them to place a proactive follow-up call to that customer.”
More than just financial insight
As SVT continued to see the possibilities as it pertained to the data, Burchart said the company began to leverage the system to provide analytics related to additional non-financial metrics. These included customer satisfaction tracking, as well as analytics related to how project success directly correlates to the specific employees assigned to the project.
“The real power of Q360 can truly be recognized by the quality of the data that we input into the system and the subsequent analytics that we are able to extract,” Burchart notes.
The icing on the cake, in many ways, is the working relationship that has been developed between his firm and Solutions360. Burchart says the team at Q360 has always been responsive to the needs of SVT.
At Solutions360 our mission is to become our customers’ most valued business partner
“Whether it has been talking through our business processes or supporting us on a moment’s notice when an unconventional request is made, Brad (Brad Dempsey, CEO of Solutions360) and his team have always been willing to engage in the conversation,” Burchart stresses. “They truly want to understand the business reason behind what we do.
“We are pleased with the continued improvements that they make to the software, which are almost always driven based on the suggestions of SVT or another user of their product.”
