Contract Energy Management
Better data shows profit margins on jobs and contracts
Payments are collected quicker thanks to better invoicing
Data has proved a sales tool as customers see the value of investment
The challenge
The finance team at Contract Energy Management (CEM) had a huge amount of transactional work to handle. With the business aiming to more than double its revenue in five years, it became essential to replace the “slow and sluggish” Sage finance system.
The heating and ventilation company looks after over 300 customers who in turn manage around 250 sites. Every callout, from a boiler repair upwards, creates a new project in the CRM system and requires an invoice to be raised and costs to be recorded.
“We had Sage 50, which normally uses an on-premises server - although we used our own Azure server, which meant extra cost,” says Tom Siviter, Chief Financial Officer.
“By the time we left Sage, we had about 10,000 projects in there. We need to track profitability down to the individual job - and that brought Sage to a standstill.”
Getting meaningful data for analysis was extremely difficult. “We couldn’t tag the projects with the identifiers we wanted,” says Tom.
“When it came to analysing the data, we had to export multiple Excel files from Sage and use our expertise with pivot tables and formulas to get a result. By the time we’d done that analysis, it wasn’t real-time information any more.” Tom Siviter, Chief Financial Officer.
The solution
Tom, a former consultant, knows a good deal about software and knew the kind of system he was looking for.
“It was a no-brainer that we needed a true cloud product, one that didn’t involve going through a remote desktop,” he says.
“We looked at Sage’s products but it was clear the features didn’t really match the price.
“I wanted a product that was fairly new but had some proven case studies behind it, because I wanted something that was going through continuous improvement.
“We turned over £4m last year and in the next five years we want to get up to £10m. We needed something that could grow with that volume of transactions, so we didn’t have to take on more people for admin-heavy jobs.
“iplicit is a product that’s only going to keep growing and has the ability to grow with us.”
Implementation by Somax was ‘fantastic’
Tom is full of praise for iplicit’s implementation partner Somax.
“Veronika Zalivska at Somax was fantastic. With my consultancy background, I said to her, ‘I’ll tell you what I want but please challenge me and push back if I’m making things too complicated’.
“We worked well together to design something that would work best for the organisation.
“We went live with iplicit first and then with a new CRM several months later. Now, the two systems work harmoniously.
“When iplicit shows a particular job made a profit of X pounds, our CRM shows the same because they’re using the same data. That’s exactly what we wanted – because with the old system, different systems showed different numbers.”
‘Analysis shouldn’t be the hard part’
iplicit's reporting capabilities have transformed the team’s ability to analyse data.
“The main thing I love about iplicit is the unlimited number of dimensions. It allows us to see reports and analysis right down to transaction level quickly,” says Tom.
“We can use that data to inform decisions, spot trends and see whether the market is responding as we expected.
“For example, like everybody in the industry, we had to put up prices, after holding off for a while. With all this project data, we can see that our conversion rate was left unaffected.
“Our aim is to ensure that analysis is not the hard bit. We want the analysis to come easily and for interpreting it to be the hard bit. That’s the part where you look at the analysis and say ‘OK, what’s that telling us and what business decisions do we need to make?’”
The team can now see what the margin on a fixed-price maintenance contract turned out to be. The data can also be a sales tool, showing customers how investing in remedial work might cost less in the long-term than leaving no investment and replacing or repairing equipment when it breaks.
“The main thing I love about iplicit is the unlimited number of dimensions. It allows us to see reports and analysis right down to transaction level quickly,” Tom Siviter, Chief Financial Officer.
Fewer questions, faster payments
iplicit has made everyday work much more efficient.
“Most of our customers are agents managing multiple sites and we’ve used iplicit to create a customer statement that breaks everything down to site level,” says Tom.
“We’ve had very good feedback from our customers’ credit control and purchase ledger teams because those statements enable them to process things quicker, without having to come back to us for more information. That means fewer questions coming back to us and fewer delays in invoices being paid.”
Approvals processes are also more streamlined, now that CEM’s operations director can easily see what an invoice covers before he approves it for payment.
Tom expects these efficiencies to continue. “If we grow at the kind of rates we’re planning, then of course we’ll have to hire more staff but we want to make sure our processes are simple enough to be scaled up,” he says.
“That’s the right approach – utilise the resources you’ve got internally first, without overstretching them, and then recruit if needed.”
‘I can’t believe I thought Sage was great’
Tom has been impressed by iplicit’s regular product improvements and the webinars that keep users up to date.
“Everyone's really pleased with the new system,” he says.
“One of my staff was a big Sage advocate because it was all she'd ever known, so she was very nervous about changing.
“But she recently said to me: ‘I'm pleased that we've done this. I can't believe I thought Sage was great. This far surpasses it.’"
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