New England Tech Air: Northeast contracting company continues to find additional value from WennSoft solution after more than a decade of use.
"I’m not sure how WennSoft could operate much better for us than it does today."
Norman Locke
Chief Financial Officer, New England Tech Air, Inc.
Since 1986, New England Tech Air of Scarborough, Maine, www.newenglandtechair.com has been a leading HVAC, sheet metal and engineering contractor, manufacturing and installing every type of commercial and industrial system, including general heating and cooling, dust collectors and general exhaust. They also produce custom metal fabrications, such as boiler breeching, metal framing and industrial guards.
In 1999, New England Tech Air leaders sought a new business software solution to address numerous challenges facing the company. Their existing job cost solution was antiquated and lacked adequate financial back-end support. A lack of integration with operational applications had resulted in duplicate data entry for inventory, job cost transactions and office payroll, leading to unproductive staff time and overall inefficiencies.
Also, the lack of detailed real time job expenses compared to projected costs was causing project variances not realized until a job was closing. These factors combined to make it difficult for company leaders to make short- or long-term decisions, particularly in labor costs.
New England Tech Air reached out to Gilchrist Scott, Ltd., a Microsoft certified business solutions partner. Gilchrist Scott teamed Tech Air leaders with WennSoft Job Cost and Microsoft ® Dynamics™ GP to provide the answers they sought.
Today, New England Tech Air utilizes not only WennSoft Job Cost, but also TimeTrack and SmartList Builder to manage 120 or more open jobs at a time.
Numerous benefits for New England Tech Air from WennSoft solution Chief Financial Officer Norman Locke reports the benefits of WennSoft Job Cost to New England Tech Air have been numerous, including:
· The annual man hours needed to enter inventory and purchase order transactions has dropped from 3,000 to 1,200, allowing employees to focus on operations rather than data entry.
· Significant decrease in staff time thanks to integration of fabrication software systems and automating payroll, human resources, inventory and other areas with Microsoft Excel and SQL based technology.
· Improvements to payroll has allowed for the elimination of one full time position. The payroll system is now secured to a level that allows non executive employees access and processing capabilities, freeing up the staff accountant to focus on more analytical items.
· Smartlists allow faster and easier reconciliation of general ledger accounts and labor reporting verification.
· Crystal Reports provides management the key performance indicators required to be proactive on jobs and allow faster reconciliation of employee loan balances.
· Overhead and labor burden – based on individual employee wages and benefits – provide immediate, true costing and more accurate job estimating.
· Real-time job status allows project managers immediate visibility for budget to actual and change orders resulting in more profitable jobs.
“I’m not sure how WennSoft could operate much better for us than it does today,” Locke said.
Vast improvement from company’s first days with WennSoft Sandy Wyman, vice president of Gilchrist Scott, recalls the early days of New England Tech Air utilizing WennSoft Job Cost and the strides that have been made.
“In those first ‘baby step’ days, there was time spent getting used to the job cost reports and learning the details behind job status information,” Wyman said. “Over time, New England Tech Air has successfully incorporated Crystal reports, SmartLists Builder, SQL and Microsoft Excel to take full advantage of the solution. The efficiency and productivity built around the WennSoft Job Cost solution is impressive.”
Locke said WennSoft Job Cost also plays an important part in Tech Air’s job bidding process.
“Today, we can clearly estimate the number of pounds of sheet metal a person can produce in the shop vs. how much a man in the field can hang each day,” he said. “How does that information correlate with total hours spent on a job? What is the total production for the shop in a given day or week or month?
“To previously get that information, we had to add up information on a job-by-job basis and make a comparison. Now, we have that information at our fingertips and we can better estimate future projects.”
Increased efficiencies have been seen at all levels of New England Tech Air.
“Thousands of individual parts might be charged out in a single day,” Locke said. “We can run a list of what parts went to what job in less than 20 minutes. In the past we weren’t collecting that information so regularly and the final total we billed to a job might not equal what was distributed.”
“With just two full time people, Tech Air has the leanest accounting staff we have seen of a company this size,” Wyman said.