Hitting a Standstill

Like many busy contractors, IDEAL Insulation & Roofing was focused on building the business and satisfying its many customers, so its accounting software wasn’t a primary concern until staff needed advanced technical support. “Our software vendor at the time wasn’t able to help us, so we began looking for a new Sage business partner,” recalls Colin Gnyp, Sales and Estimating Manger for IDEAL. “We found The Answer Company, a local firm with a lot of resources and a commitment to customer service. We brought them in to help us move forward.”

Partnering with a Professional Team

The Answer Company performed a review of the company’s ERP deployment and found multiple opportunities for improvement. “We had just been going along, without really considering if there were better, more effective ways to use the software,” Gnyp says. “The Answer Company identified many things we could change, do differently or incorporate into our processes that could increase the software’s usability.”

Structuring the Software to Fit the Business

Seizing the opportunity for improvement, IDEAL put The Answer Company to work. “They essentially re-implemented the software for us, doing it the way it should have been done from the start,” Gnyp says. “They remapped our general ledger account codes to allow us to get better and more comprehensive data from the system.”

Gaining Control of Project Costs

The biggest transformation came with the implementation of a service management and project tracking add-on, Technisoft Service Manager. IDEAL may have 50 or more open projects at any time, lasting anywhere from a day to a year. Previously, each project was simply tracked as a sales order. It was exceedingly difficult to capture product, labor and other related costs and associate them with the project.“We are now able to manage every dollar, every item and every task on our projects,” says Gnyp. “It was a sweeping change in the way we manage our projects, and it has put us firmly in control of the process.”

The company’s field managers have embraced the Service Manager module as it provides them with a real-time picture of their jobs, their customers, and projects’ overall profitability. “We now have the right tool for the job,” says Gynp. “We have the details we need, along with the big picture. With all project information being tracked in the software, we also have improved accuracy, efficiency and transparency.”

The Answer Company also implemented the Payroll module, integrated with employee time clocks, to allow IDEAL to collect accurate and timely project labor cost information, for a full and accurate picture of project costs.

Gaining Meaningful Insight

Their ERP is now delivering more of the decision-making data IDEAL needs.

Previously, IDEAL relied heavily on Excel for reporting, because it simply wasn’t tracking the data in the way it needed to draw meaningful reports.

“Now rather than assembling reports in Excel, I’m spending more time analyzing the business, looking for trends and opportunities for improvement,” Gynp says. “For example, I can see where we are spending our time, and whether we are spending it profitably. We can review our larger customers’ jobs to ensure we’re charging fairly. It’s this ability to make quantitative, fact-based decisions that give us an edge.”

Leveraging the Investment

Gynp praises The Answer Company for their knowledge, resourcefulness and patience. “The Answer Company met our people, learned our business and made expert recommendations that have significantly improved the value we get from Sage 300. They helped us redesign and re-implement our software and we’re now getting exactly what we need from our software investment.”