The Challenge

• The company was tied to an outdated accounting system that was going to cost several million dollars in business costs to replace, they were not ready to transition to a new accounting system, but were seeking options.
• Data visibility was the primary difficulty, data was being accumulated, like the number of hours being charged to projects by employees, categorized by trade type, and by task identifiers, but the reports the accounting system produced were tedious to pull out of the system. Users had to study the data meticulously to find anomalies, usually by printing out physical sheets of paper in order to even read the data.

The Solution

• Built a cloud based platform that extended the legacy accounting system, making the data it accumulated accessible in an easy to digest way.
• Rather than disrupting the entire companies business processes by gutting the accounting system and replacing it with something new, extensions were made to the existing system, where the company could pilot a new solution and refactor as needed along the way.
• We designed and implemented a platform to give direct visibility into where time was being spent from week to week, and made it accessible to everyone who needed it, behind a role based authentication system, allowing company managers to see the full picture of their departments projects, instead of only seeing things at a microscopic level.

Results & Growth

The Labor Tracking System continues to be refined over time, new features are usually defined in iterations of 3-6 week sprints. The initial phase took somewhere between 3-4 weeks to get infrastructure in place, write the first version of the agents that connect to the data source, and then to build out the cloud infrastructure to view the data.

The first iteration was built with the executive team and department heads in mind, who would then provide their feedback before making changes that could then be made to make the tool available for project management teams and labor managers.

In total the project took 6-9 months, with about 3 different release cycles, and has become the core of their cloud based management infrastructure.

The results have significantly increased the amount of labor each project management team can handle, significantly increasing the amount of profit the company could bring in each year.