Enterprise IT Services for Construction Industry

Executive Summary

Our customer is a 100 year old, billion-dollar US based Construction Company providing an extensive selection of bridge, drainage, earth stabilization & storm water solutions. The customer had acquired a number of other companies over past decade and thus had over 40 different applications and a database with ~350GB of data.

ennovate’s engagement with the customer began with supporting their software applications on Microsoft .NET technology. Gradually, ennovate’s team demonstrated their expertise on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains (GP) software through pilot projects assigned by the customer and won the confidence of the customer to customize their existing CRM and ERP systems. The customer was also looking for Business Intelligence (BI) solution for strategic as well as operational decision makers. ennovate proved instrumental in saving significant cost in technology investment by suggesting appropriate Business Intelligence tools for customer requirements.

For past 2 years, ennovate has served as a technology offshoring wing of this construction giant by offering complete IT services in Microsoft technologies like .Net, Biztalk Server, SharePoint Server, PerformancePoint Server and Microsoft Dynamics CRM & Great Plains.

The Customer

Our customer offers a wide array of innovative solutions for both initial development and rehabilitation of existing structures and sites. Their involvement with products and applications is founded on a century of research and practical field experience. Their products provide effective site solutions for projects with a variety of loading conditions, foundation requirements, soil and water environments as well as varied installation demands.

The Challenge

  •  Acquisitions done by customer over years bought in a lot of IT challenges in terms of diverse applications on different platforms and the need to consolidate the functionality into cohesive applications
  • Lack of documentation for legacy applications added to the complexity
  • They had over 40 applications and ~350GB of data
  • Existing CRM implementation was lacking in providing control over customer base and maintaining credits given to customers
  • Many custom applications were built around existing ERP implementation. They were adding to complexity of business operations. The customer also wanted to replace manual work flow with automated system in place
  • The system in place was lacking in providing consolidated information to the top management

The Solution

  • Application Development & Enhancement : Having fully understood the business processes, we looked at all the existing applications and identified avenues to sunset unused applications, combine applications with similar functionalities, create new applications where required and enhance the utility of existing applications
  • Application Maintenance : Within a short span of time, we were able to optimize 35% of their database space and reduce the number of applications by 30% which further enhanced the functionality resulting in a lower cost of maintenance. ennovate provided round the clock maintenance on critical business applications and documented everything for a faster turnaround and better productivity
  • Package Implementations : We were involved in end to end implementations of ERP packages on CRM and financial accounting. A lot of these packages required customizations and through our in depth understanding of business functionality and technology, we were not only able to successfully achieve that but also eliminated a lot of redundant existing applications. We were able to provide complex customizations which were applauded by the customer as well by the vendor themselves
  • Business Intelligence : With so many diverse data sources in different formats, there was no organization wide view of how all the divisions were doing individually and as a whole. We created an enterprise data warehouse – single version of truth to facilitate BI. Also, they had invested on expensive BI tools which were unable to satisfy the end user reporting & analytical requirements. We were able to propose BI on their existing tools and were also able to optimize BI on traditional data sources like excel and flat files. With our BI solution, we were able to reduce their BI IT budget by 40% and provide all operational and strategic users with Ad hoc and drill down reports, scorecards and dashboards along with multidimensional analytical capabilities using cubes

The Technology

  • Microsoft .NET
  • Microsoft BizTalk Server
  • Microsoft SharePoint Server
  • Business Intelligence
    • Hyperion
    • Microsoft SQL Server BI
  • Microsoft Dynamics
    • CRM
    • Great Plains (GP)
  • Databases
    • SQL Server 2000
    • SQL Server 2005
    • Access
    • FoxPro

The Benefit

  • Cost effectiveness solution through off shoring
  • Single point for all Consultancy Services
  • Documentation and full control on most of the applications and databases
  • Saving of over $300K on Business Intelligence tools

Customer Testimonial

"ennovate has done an excellent job in understanding a business finance issue, designing a solution, and planning for the future, resulting in many game-changing successes for us in ERP. Thanks to them on their help with this project in expertise of the data warehouse and I know that it has already paid dividends in supplying me at least with accurate information across all ledgers."

- Head Controller, Construction Industry

 "We have been extremely happy with our relationship with ennovate. They staffed us with highest quality consultants, both onsite and offshore. I would recommend them to any company for their flexibility, commitment to service and attention to detail"

- Vice President, IT

"ennovate has done an excellent job in understanding a business finance issue, designing a solution and planning for the future, resulting in many game-changing successes for us in Business Intelligence. I recommend ennovate and look forward to many successful projects with them"

- BI Director, Construction Industry