Anthesis examines the numerous variables which can impede project profitability and identifies a best practice approach to turning this around.
If you’re in an industry that engineers, designs, procures, manufactures, and installs, you’ll know the headache that comes with understanding where your main profit margins are. This challenge is often made even more complicated as a result of a systems landscape that is as easy to control as a herd of cats chasing clockwork mice.
Increased competition, along with socio-political turbulence, rising costs, and supply chain volatility, has resulted in timescales becoming more aggressive but unexpected delays remain stubbornly common. However, with a need for innovation and customer collaboration now very much in the “prerequisite”, rather than “nice to have” box, cost management on a project can be the defining factor for success. With the scope for small costs to easily spiral quickly, having a real-time view from which to inform strategy and channel resources into the most profitable projects and sectors is key.
Understanding current visibility
In understanding the extent to which you have visibility of costs associated with a project, it’s important to ask two key questions: how long does such analysis take you at the moment? And where does that data come from?
For example – run through this checklist and whether you have a specific system/process to manage it:
- Customer accounts and contacts
- Engineering and design
- Time booking for engineers to project
- Project planning
- Procurement & material planning
- Manufacturing execution
- Warehouse management and scanning
- Shipment documentation and export control
- Installation & Commissioning
- Service contracts
- Preventative maintenance of your own machinery
- Service execution
- Human resource management
If you are reliant on multiple systems to extract this data, it’s unsurprising that it takes a long time to find out what a sales contract actually costs you. Your team has to gather reports from scattered data and then try to align them all to make some semblance of sense before you then factor in the cost of the time required to collate this information.
Game-changing capabilities.
Thankfully, the availability of comprehensive, industry-specific solutions, designed to meet multiple business challenges with a single platform, is representing somewhat of a game-changer in curating a more modern, insight-driven business. This has meant that many of our customers experience a much simpler process to collate this vital information.
IFS Cloud provides a single project record, allowing users to connect time bookings, procurement, manufacture and installation in one place. The business can set revenue and cost elements to analyse project cost at practically every level and control as-built structures directly into the service management module of the application.
All of this means project costs can be analysed in a single screen, allowing rapid review of profitable projects and identification of those that are straying into unacceptable profit margins. A native integration to Microsoft Power BI means the data can be viewed however you like, when and wherever suits you.
In practice, it delivers an average of 17% productivity gains, 14% faster product delivery times and 10% more orders delivered in a timely manner. In turn, the visibility of these insights instils the confidence necessary to carve out new revenue models which will build all-important market share and promote sustainability in the new economies of the future.
A simpler, more effective way forward
There’s no doubt that digitalisation has brought with it ways to work smarter, faster, more collaboratively, and with greater intelligence. IFS Cloud marries traditional process mapping with digital transformation requirements, building the necessary resilience and agility to truly cement a foundation for future growth.
Anthesis can help you release the value of your enterprise applications through expert consultancy and implementation of world-leading business systems. Why not ask if we can simplify your analytics? Contact us today.
