When BMD Group was founded in 1979 the company posted an annual turnover of $600,000.

Today it is one of Australia’s largest civil construction groups with almost 900 employees, turning over $500 million in the 2006/07 financial year. With key strategies in place to support expansion and development, BMD has always been focused on ensuring its business operations were moving forward.

In 2001, however, it became apparent that the company’s current construction management software could not keep up with the growth of business and was retarding backend efficiency. “We knew we needed a system upgrade,” says BMD IT manager John Mulder, “but we kept putting it off because it wasn’t causing any obvious problems. We eventually realised that the functionality of our old system was limiting our back office performance and had become a company liability.” Mulder says BMD had been continuously growing its operations and increasing its personnel roster – adding pressure on top of pressure.

“It became apparent that our existing applications could not handle the additional workload,” he says, “resulting in extremely slow processing times for all of our back office applications. The additional employees also stretched the capacity of our payroll system which meant we had to outsource which was costing us a fortune.”

Search for a solution
After an extensive product search and short listing process BMD chose Enabling to deliver a Timberline Office solution. “We chose the software because it was significantly better suited to the civil construction industry than any other application package,” says Mulder.

“When we looked at the software providers in front of us we chose Enabling because they were the most established company in Queensland and had a proven & successful history with other civil contractors.”

The Timberline Office solution was installed over a period of several weeks with all the relevant data being imported from the previous system. The modules that were installed were Accounts Payable, Billing, EFT, Estimating, Fixed Assets, General Ledger, Information Assistant, Job Cost, Payroll, Project Management and Procurement.

The immediate impact was that the integrated components of Timberline eliminated data entry duplication and removed the requirement for third party products for effective reporting. Over a longer period, it was realised that altering some business processes to make the software more usable and effective was necessary. Implementing these changes improved overall efficiencies and provided more accurate and up-to-date reporting. Mulder says the return on investment was rapidly achieved.

One of the most significant benefits of implementing Sage Timberline Office was realised through the addition of the Payroll module. This allowed BMD to perform tasks that were previously outsourced at significant expense and relied on the preparation and collation of payroll time-sheet information with manual management of project labour costs.

Payroll streamlined this process and the back office now has access to applications that deliver the flexibility and control that was needed at a fraction of the cost of outsourcing. BMD continues to have a strong relationship with Enabling says Mulder and both parties plan to continue their successful relationship. “Now we have a setup that matches our needs and provides us with the flexibility to expand when and how we want,” he says.

For more information
Enabling
www.enabling.net
Ph 0800 ENABLING

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