Summary

A fabrication welding business was expanding, and needed a better way to manage the company finances and the various projects being undertaken so that the team could concentrate on the work that made the company money.

The company was working in spreadsheets for finance and also to manage the various projects that they were undertaking. This made managing the financial aspects of the business difficult, project management was time consuming and the profitability of the various projects and jobs was only apparent at the end of the year when year-end accounts were collated.

Key Activities

• The business was mapped using the Lean tool "Value Stream Map". This gave an excellent overview of how the business functions, and afforded the opportunity to remove any non-value adding work which was taking place.
• A market sweep of the available applications was undertaken, and the Tidywork package was chosen as an excellent fit for the business to manage its work. Tidy integrates well with the Xero finance package, and so this system was chosen to manage all of the financial aspects of the business.
• sXero was implemented initially, and the team got used to using a cloud based software package before implementing Tidywork. The second phase of the project was implemented with a little help from Tidy, and was soon embraced by the company. Short training sessions were undertaken, however the nature of the solution meant that the team soon picked up the system.

Results

The spreadsheets that were previously used to manage the finances continued for a few weeks following the introduction of Xero to give the financial team confidence that the system was working. These spreadsheets have now fallen into disuse, with Xero providing all of the information needed & managing the bills & invoices effectively as well as reconciling the bank account on a daily basis.

Implementing Tidywork brought immediate benefits - one recurring project which was thought to be making the company a profit was actually making a loss. Immediate corrective action was taken, and the cost of the Tidy was recouped in that single operation. The system is now being used to manage all projects, with time & materials being planned in detail during the quotation stage giving an enhanced level of assurance that the quotation will be accurate - and that billing takes place quickly & easily.