Engineering Consultancy

The Company

A Structural Engineering company with over 20 engineers & draft people working with businesses primarily out of Melbourne. They provide engineering and drafting services for residential, commercial and apartment construction all over Australia. They operate from an office in Essendon but have satellite offices in 2 other cities.

The Situation  

Fast growth has meant that it had becoming harder and harder to track time allocated to jobs as well as profitability of the business. Also, with several offices the admin employees needed to keep the finger on the pulse of all the staff without having to be in that city. They had money in the bank but no real way of understanding where that money had come from, or how much was work was still to be completed.

The Solution

I introduced them to WorkflowMax, a time management, billing & Work In Progress (WIP) app that allowed the business to take control of its billing, staff efficiency and quoting processes.

When setting up the program we noticed that the way the client did there billing and quoting had differed to other companies we worked with, so we knew we needed to spend time developing

procedures and protocols that would ensure the information that came from the system was correct. A key feature of WorkflowMax is the flexibility to handle an unlimited selection of scenarios, it just needs to have the correct procedures and reports created to ensure the information is extracted properly.

The Results

They ended up with a system that tracked their employee’s productivity, job profitability and allowed them to manage the quoting pipeline, we are working on an ongoing basis provide education, support and quarterly checks to ensure there is not a build up of dead information which can a big issue in project management apps.

They have just completed employee pay reviews for the first time with accurate data provided by WorkFlowMax. Allowing them to have a clear indication as to who were the best preforming employees for the full year. I was also able to provide the guidance on how to properly incentivize their employees that may of needed to improve in areas they were below average in.

The Last Shout

Signing up to a free trial software or paying a monthly fee for an app will not instantly change your business. To best maximise the effectiveness of any new app or software, time needs to be put in at the beginning to develop the right procedures, reports and work papers.

I see it time and time again customers coming to me having subscribed to software they are either not using or using incorrectly, through lack of time to fully learn it. I highly recommend you hire an expert/certified advisor for the setup phase of the software. You are paying for the software why don’t you get someone to guide you through it.