Aevenia, Inc.
"It used to take 9 days to close the month, now it takes just 5. Without the efficiencies we achieve with WennSoft in reporting, we would never be able to close that quickly."
Donnette Malakowski
Controller for Aevenia
ABOUT AEVENIA
Moorhead, Minnesota based Aevenia®, Inc. is the premier energy and electrical construction company in the Midwest. With eight areas of expertise, they cover every critical aspect oftheir customer’s project. That eliminates the added time, stress and expense that come withcoordinating multiple contractors and subcontractors. Aevenia, Inc. is owned by Otter TailCorporation in Fargo, North Dakota.
Aevenia has been using WennSoft Signature since 2001 and currently owns Job Cost and Service Management Series. Job Cost enables better decision-making by providing visibilityinto labor, materials, subcontractors, billing, purchase orders, and other related items. Service Management Series improves organizations’ field service by capturing service calls,
dispatching assignments, tracking resolutions and managing contracts.
Aevenia has worked with Summit Group Software on its WennSoft and Microsoft DynamicsGP solution. Summit Group Software helps improve the business success of their clients byproviding an incomparable level of information technology services and solutions.
BETTER MANAGEMENT OF REVENUE AND PROFIT MARGINS
Aevenia used to have problems managing change orders. They relied heavily oninformation provided by the Project Managers, which was challenging if the Project Manager didn’t report a change order in a timely manner. They also tracked change orders only afterthey were confirmed. This made it difficult to know whether or not projects were going tobe profitable because the accounting department had no way to determine all outstandingcosts.
“If a project had a large volume of change orders, we used to take big swings on the revenue and profit margin of jobs,” said Donnette Malakowski, Controller for Aevenia.
Now Aevenia uses Job Cost to track all change orders. WennSoft enables Aevenia to look at change orders that are in-process and confirmed, track costs with more detailed costcodes, and see the costs associated with in-process change orders. This has made their
revenue and profit margins more stable, as they can match revenues with incurred costs in the same month.
WennSoft also gives Aevenia the ability to categorize change orders several different ways so they can keep the costs of in-process change orders separate from costs of confirmed change orders.
“Job Cost helps us track information and keep it tied to the project,” said Malakowski. “If the change order doesn’t come to pass, Job Cost allows us to put in notes explaining why the scope of the project didn’t change.”
Having more stable profit margins and revenue has helped them manage their cash flow. They use the committed
costs in Job Cost to know how much cash they need to reserve to cover upcoming expenditures.
“If your committed costs aren’t accurate, you’re never going to be as accurate forecasting your cash,” said Malakowski.
MANAGING SUBCONTRACTOR PAYABLES AND RECEIVABLES
Controlling subcontractor expenditures and payments was also causing swings to Aevenia’s profit margins and revenues. They used to track these costs manually, which resulted in data sometimes being overlooked. Occasionally they would get to the end of the job and realize that they owed a subcontractor more or less money than they anticipated. Since they hadn’t planned for this, their profit margin would rise or fall sharply.
“It was difficult to know where we’re going to end up on a job,” said Malakowski.
Aevenia now uses the WennSoft subcontractor module to effectively track subcontractor costs. Aevenia’s
contract administrators use WennSoft to look at each subcontractor, perform change orders, modify and manage their contract, which will in turn update their committed costs. This enables Aevenia to know
how a job is performing through every step of the project.
FASTER MONTH END CLOSINGS
WennSoft has reduced the amount of time it takes for Aevenia to complete their month-end close. It used to be extremely labor intensive trying to tie out and balance their month end, tying out all the GLs and finalizing their schedule of values reports. WennSoft has simplified this reporting and made the process much more efficient.
“It used to take 9 days to close the month, now it takes just 5,” said Malakowski. “Without the efficiencies
we achieve with WennSoft in reporting, we would never be able to close that quickly.”
WennSoft has also streamlined overhead in Aevenia’s accounting. They are able to get a lot accomplished with only five accountants. “If we didn’t have Microsoft Dynamics GP and WennSoft, our company would definitely need more accountants," said Malakowski.
BETTER REPORTING
Creating reports was sometimes a challenge for Aevenia because they didn’t have much flexibility. When they created a report, like their monthly job schedule report, they had to combine two separate reports, which was a lot of work. It involved printing out the two reports, then manually going into Excel to update the reports for any changes in revenue, costs-to-date, billings-to-date, contract value, forecasted costs and estimated costs.
We would have to go through every column for every job and adjust each of these, which consumed a lot of time,” said Malakowski.
Now Aevenia is using SRS reports through WennSoft, and the report automatically pulls in the necessary data,
so all they have to do is some cutting and pasting.
“We love the SRS reporting. It has shaved two days off the process of creating our monthly job schedule report,”
said Malakowski. “This efficiency allows our staff to do other things.”
A GREAT PARTNERSHIP
Aevenia has been with WennSoft for almost a decade. One of the reasons for this longevity is they have such a great partnership with the software solution provider. WennSoft has helped Aevenia provide excellent customer service. Aevenia strives to give their customers the ultimate value of a quality project, done on time, and within budget. WennSoft is so integrated with Microsoft Dynamics GP that it allows Aevenia to see how they are doing on these measures throughout the project, rather than waiting until the project completion. Having real time information allows them to better manage and provide value to their customers.
Aevenia also appreciates the efforts WennSoft takes to ensure their customers get the most out of their solution. Malakowski regularly uses WennSoft TechKnowledge,an online resource that enables customers to find solutions to common problems 24/7. She also finds WennSoft support to be a terrific resource.
“WennSoft support is great. In addition to being patient, they always strive to understand
my question fully and then work diligently to come up with the best possible solution,”said Malakowski.
WENNSOFT EVOLVES WITH AEVENIA
Malakowski said that WennSoft has been instrumental in helping Aevenia evolve. Aevenia started out with two divisions whose primary focus was commercial electrical construction & transmission, and distribution-line construction. During the last eight years, they made these areas into a truly turnkey electrical energy construction company with eight different services: renewable energy, transmission & distribution, substations,fiber optics, underground construction, data communications, urban telecommunications, traffic systems, and commercial/industrial electrical contracting.
With all of these changes, WennSoft has continued to grow and support their software
needs in all areas and truly helped them grow and be the competitive contractor required in these economic times.
"WennSoft is a very practical solution, easy to implement, and covers all aspects of tracking job costs, efficient service billings, as well as flowing through to the financial applications flawlessly,” said Malakowski.
To learn more about how WennSoft Solutions can have a similar impact on your
organization, please contact us at 262-317-3700 or info@wennsoft.com.