The company’s incoming chief financial officer had a vision to “create an environment where we have a centralized information architecture for the company with updated technology, better data flow and better visibility into financials and reporting.” Ultimately, this robust technology architecture would need to support growth across all business areas, including finance, human resources and operations.
They brought in RSM to assist in enabling data to flow in an integrated and efficient manner throughout the company, within and between their core business processes and functions. The project team’s solution was to enhance visibility, efficiency and accuracy through automation.
RSM supported the company through their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system upgrade to COINS, a leading construction management software solution for streamlining and managing core business processes. Specifically, RSM provided strategic advice during the selection and implementation of the new ERP system. The new system would lead to more integrated and streamlined processes across project management, procurement and financial management, thereby reducing the company’s overall application footprint.
Next came the focus on talent management. The construction company recognized the need to modernize hiring processes and enhance diversity and inclusion efforts. Implementing a human resource information system (HRIS) would help the company meet their HR goals by improving workforce productivity through automation and facilitating data collection to aid in hiring decisions. RSM assisted the company in selecting UKG as their future HRIS system and continues to support them through the implementation journey.
Elevating business operations to the next level
The move toward optimization opened the door to more opportunities to achieve operational excellence. With a strong infrastructure in place, the construction company wanted to understand how they could leverage technology and data to secure their standing as a contractor and employer of choice. Key questions included: How can we improve the customer and employee experience? Do we have the right capabilities and people in the right places to execute our technology vision? What is the road map for getting us there?
RSM worked to gain deeper knowledge of the construction company’s project management and administrative functions and how they compared to industry best practices. Additionally, the project team conducted a business motions analysis to identify improvement areas and saw opportunities to prevent revenue leakage.
With these insights, RSM analyzed different approaches with critical stakeholders toward an enterprise strategy to standardize processes, improve efficiency and create scalable operations. The plan included a future-state technology division built on four key pillars: data collection, automation adoption, project delivery and industry-leading practices.
Improving data clarity and insights using customer-facing dashboards would allow the construction company to share real-time data to increase transparency and trust. Investing in a centralized data warehouse would help reduce redundancies and establish a single source of truth to support data-driven decision making.
The cornerstone of the plan was to create an innovation center of excellence. Centralizing information technology operations into a single business unit would provide structure, shared knowledge and dedicated resources to fully leverage core applications across the enterprise.
The construction company’s enterprise technology strategy, designed to be rolled out in phases, will lead to the following:
- More efficient processes
- Ability to scale using existing resources
- Real-time financial reporting
- Fully integrated project management and estimations
- Ability to scale with growth
- More collaboration between the firm’s owners and subcontractors
- Improved customer experience
Down the road, even more opportunity exists to optimize. The company’s technology vision extends to reconfiguring their Salesforce CRM system and upgrading the project delivery platform to specialized construction management software to leverage data and technology to its fullest potential.
