Logistical prepares for migration journey

Logistical building services logo

An inspirational contractor is now undergoing user acceptance testing ahead of its migration from CONSTRUCT to RedSky’s flagship enterprise resource planning solution.

Established in 2008, Logistical Building Services (Electrical) is a leading mechanical, electrical and plumbing contractor employing more than 150 skilled staff on a range of projects in London and the South East. In 2019 the company earned a place in the annual ‘1000 Companies to Inspire Britain’ report, produced by the London Stock Exchange Group.

The company had been using RedSky’s CONSTRUCT legacy system since 2012. Finance Director Hilary Williams felt that it was time to embrace the latest technology available, to help improve its systems and processes, so she attended a RedSky migration session in London during the summer. Impressed by what she’s seen and learned at the event, she decided to migrate to RedSky’s flagship system.

Hilary is very much looking forward to the performance enhancements that the new system will bring. “At the moment, we print out invoices, get them approved manually, scan them into the system with delivery tickets and then store them on an internal, cloud-based system,” she said. “The Invoice Register will be far more efficient and a lot quicker, because it’ll digitise the entire process, including approvals.”

Business Analytics will provide access to real-time information, to facilitate better-informed business decisions. “This new functionality is going to be great for the directors,” said Hilary, “because we’ll each have our own up-to-the-minute reports on our screen, tailored to our job role. Once the dashboards are set up, we’ll be able to view real-time information in a very user-friendly format.”

Purchase Order Processing will also become much simpler and faster, once the new system is up and running. With a turnover of more than £20 million, Logistical orders a huge amount of materials every week, for multiple projects. “At the moment,” said Hilary, “we type out each order on Excel and file it on our system in the office. We are quite quick at inputting the data, but it is a very labour-intensive process. The new Purchase Order Processing functionality will speed up things up considerably.”

But it’s not just about speed: under the current arrangement, the directors can’t get into the Accounts system for an up-to-date view on costs. The new Purchase Order Processing function will rectify that: “All the directors will have access to the cost information. We’ll have far better cost controls as well as instant visibility of spending and improved auditability.”

Having experienced a catastrophic server failure some years ago that resulted in the loss of six months’ data, Hilary is a huge fan of RedSky’s hosting service, which she will continue to use once Logistical has migrated to the latest software solution. She said: “Being hosted gives me peace of mind because I know that everything has been backed up properly. It means I can sleep at night.”

To find out more about RedSky’s construction-specific software solutions, get in touch via contact form or telephone 44 (0)20 3002 8700. Middle East customers telephone 971(0)4 362 5106.