No more “reading between the lines” for The Lines Company

CUSTOMER PROFILE

The Lines Company (TLC) is an electricity lines business based in Te Kuiti, King Country. The electricity network maintained by TLC is one of the largest in New Zealand which doesn’t have a major urban centre, making them specialist in providing power to out of the way places (including the Turoa and Whakapapa ski fields). TLC also provides full electrical contracting services to both residential and business customers.

BUSINESS SITUATION

With several disparate and ageing systems covering various components of the business, TLC were looking for a more integrated solution to cover their operational and financial requirements.  TLC’s business is very “job” or project-based and very labour intensive, making the allocation and capture of costs against those projects on an accurate and timely basis key to managing and measuring ongoing performance. Under legacy systems there could be a delay of up to two weeks before costs would be updated against the relevant projects, creating uncertainty over the status, performance and profitability of those projects.   In addition, reporting options were limited and not generally available to staff “at the coalface” to be able to gain visibility over the performance of their business units outside of the regular management reporting cycle.

 SOLUTIONS

With the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics NAV TLC now has a fully integrated financial system solution including inventory management, advanced job / project costing features, procurement and financial management and reporting.  Specific customization was performed by Acumen to integrate NAV’s job costing system with the IMS Payroll solution used by TLC. This has resulted in timesheet data for both staff and plant being captured on a “real-time” basis against the relevant job, rather than having to wait for the payroll to be completed. This has provided Managers responsible for those Jobs with more timely information on which to manage the ongoing position and performance of their Jobs. Jobs are also now billed as they are completed rather than having to wait for final costs, improving cash flow.

With the introduction of Microsoft SQL Reporting Services for key financial and job reporting, line and job managers now have online access to financial performance reports specific to their business units and jobs. This provides the flexibility to view performance whenever required (including outside of the normal management reporting cycle) and in a format to suit each particular user. Reports can also be automatically sent to users based on a schedule or timetable. Financial reports prepared by TLC’s finance team in NAV can be seamlessly published to SQL Reporting Services without the need for any further development.  Further work has been performed to provide an “intra-company” billing solution to streamline and automate the billing of work between different business units within the company, minimizing the amount of paperwork required, minimizing data input errors and reducing the time required to process internal invoices.

TLC also use a specialist utility-industry billing solution to handle the complex customer billing requirements inherent in the electricity business (TLC is the only lines company in New Zealand which “self-bills” its customers). Acumen performed integration with the Gentrack utility billing system in order to synchronise customer details between Gentrack and Dynamics NAV and also to pass billing and financial transactions between the two systems to ensure that billing data was complete and available on a timely basis.

BENEFITS

·         Fully integrated, real-time financial solution covering all aspects of the business, minimizing any manual intervention and double-entry of data

·         Integration with other key business systems to provide automated updates of key data on a timely basis

·         Recording of all job / project costs in real-time to provide up to date view of project position and performance

·         Flexible reporting solution using Microsoft SQL Reporting Services provides easy access to key management reports and flexible provision of new reports on a timely basis

SOFTWARE & SERVICES PROVIDED

• Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 SP1 Advanced Management for 15 users
• Microsoft SQL Reporting Services reporting portal
• Integration of Dynamics NAV with IMS Payroll system
• Integration of Dynamics NAV with Gentrack utilities billing system
• Provision of Acumen’s “Advanced Job Costing” enhancements
• Full system implementation consulting services