It has been two and half years since Dustin Campbell took the helm at Adtech Systems, and over that time the company has focused heavily on internal operations. “Our general thesis is you have to have a very strong operational core before you go out and focus on sales and marketing,” explains Campbell.
From the beginning, Campbell and his partner Philip Muscatello planned to invest in an ERP software platform. After 18 months of careful planning and preparation, Adtech went live with Q360 in November, 2016.
“Almost nobody talks about ERP implementations as going smoothly,” says Campbell. But he believes that this can usually be attributed to a lack of preparation prior to implementation, so Campbell took the time to get ready.
“You must go in with the right attitude and the right mindset, then you can accomplish some amazing things. Solutions360 has done a marvelous job of making that happen for us.”
For a successful ERP implementation, it is important to get buy in from the employees. People need to understand why they have to change.
“It is important to get people to understand why they have to capture information in a new way. Sometimes data is being captured much earlier in the process than it was before, and at first it just feels like a lot of new work,” says Campbell.
If you are not clear about articulating how the scope of an individual’s work is going to change it can present challenges for adoption, according to Campbell. “So it has to be well planned and well communicated in order to have a relatively smooth transition.”
Nobody wants to go back to the old systems, Campbell reports, “But some of our people are still in that transition period. They had 25 years of remembering how we used to do things, so it is not yet the new normal for everyone.”
Eight months after going live with Q360, Adtech is starting to see the downstream ramifications. There is better internal communication, and it motivates the employees to see the results of their efforts.
Adtech increases employee engagement with Solutions360
Once the infrastructure is in place, it makes it much easier to bring people together to communicate about the business.
We started having monthly all hands on deck meetings. We go over high level sales, profitability statistics, talk about our backlog and the overall health of the business. All of this data comes from Q360. Then we try to highlight employee contributions to our values, and things we think make us a stronger company.
“Q360 gives us faster access to data, and we find this really enhances internal communications.”
The Q360 platform is sophisticated enough that nobody can absorb it immediately or even in 8 months, Campbell reports. “Our team keeps bubbling up new ideas for the data, so we are in regular contact with Solutions360. They have been fantastic to work with to make our ideas happen.”
Adtech is about to roll out an automated close out report to all employees. When a project closes, every employee that was on that project will get an email with a project summary. What was the budget? Where did the project come in relative to the budget? How many change orders were internally driven? How many customer change orders? What was the timeline of the project? Did we get squeezed in any one area of the project?
“This data is meaningful and has a big impact when it is shared. We didn’t have this kind of capability before Q360.”
“We are already a very different company in many ways, but next year is really going to be telling for us,” Campbell concludes, “There are going to be a number of benefits that will accrue from having a more robust system in place.”
