The challenge – to provide a centralised infrastructure for a holding company with diverse and remote business operations. Mission accomplished with CommArc innovation and teamwork!
As the holding company for a range of companies that trade in
sectors as diverse as transport, tourism, waste management and
concrete construction, this client puts the "diverse" into
"diversified"!
With a quickly expanding operation, it became clear that the
15-year old financial management software being used by their head
office would not allow enough flexibility or control to manage the
company's growth. What's more, the old system was costing
employees' time they could have been diverting to more productive
activities and requiring customers to wait for the results of
routine enquiries.
The client's financial controller commissioned CommArc to take
stock of the system and suggest how the company's operations could
be centralised and upgraded in a way that would manage growth in
the future. They also threw CommArc some lateral technology
problems - such as how staff on remote geographical locations could
message each other without access to Internet or mobile phone
infrastructure.
CommArc produced a plan that phased development over a period of
time, focusing on the infrastructure and gearing up head office for
the centralisation of its operations. The project team consisted of
CommArc, which also managed third party technology providers, the
client and a financial software supplier during the later stages of
the project.
From the outset, the financial controller observed that
CommArc's contribution had as much to do with people as with
technology. CommArc managed third parties, requiring very little
input from the client, but keeping her up to date with
developments. When she phoned with an enquiry, every CommArc staff
member she spoke to seemed to know her and the status of her
project and CommArc's 24-hour Response Centre quietly fixed
occasional crises affecting the client in the middle of the
night.
"We got exactly what was promised, and everything was finished
to the last detail - there were no loose ends", she says.
CommArc took innovation in its stride - for instance, the
messaging problem mentioned above was solved using radio
technology. The client observed that CommArc had a breadth of
technology knowledge beyond what she expected, shown by the
diversity of the solutions it created, all within budget and on
time.
The result has enabled the client to deliver a slicker service
that partly contributed to outstanding returns, such as the
client's best year on record for one of its tourism operations.
"Our systems are slicker, our service is so much ahead of what it
was and we have the potential to offer a lot more than we did
before", she says.
She was most impressed when CommArc met her father, the chairman
of the board and an avowed technophobe. "He said he would
grudgingly give them an hour, and I was amazed to see them still
talking three hours later". Then he [her father] came out of the
meeting all excited and saying, "We can do this and this and
this…".
Everyone in CommArc is like that. They can turn technology into
plain English, and I've never seen any technology provider make it
that easy to understand.