Construction
Why did Joseph Gallagher choose EasyBuild’s ERP technology?
How EasyBuild’s ERP technology is supporting Joseph Gallagher and transforming their business to real-time reporting, forecasting and finally saying goodbye to multiple spreadsheets.
Industry best practices in the product that provide additional functionality
Tell us your background and role at Joseph Gallagher
My name's Matt Mussell,
I’m the group finance director for the Joseph Gallagher Group and have worked in construction for over 25 years. I’ve been with the business for just over three years, through quite a challenging period of that little thing called Covid. The Group is made up of four subsidiary companies, all complementing our core services of tunneling and civil engineering. Joseph Gallagher Limited (JGL) is pretty much where the lion’s share of the action is, the turnover there is just over £100m a year, and we employ around 800 people. The nature of the Joseph Gallagher business is evenly weighted between reinforced concrete structures and tunneling / civils specialists.
Why did Joseph Gallagher choose EasyBuild’s ERP technology?
(...)EasyBuild doesn’t look like you are just filling out boxes in a spreadsheet.
I inherited EasyBuild when I joined Joseph Gallagher. The main thing that attracted the board of directors here was probably its ease of use, it’s got a nice look about it. I come from a background where I’ve used all sorts of ERP systems and the general look of most is like looking at a spreadsheet. However, EasyBuild doesn’t look like you are just filling out boxes in a spreadsheet.
Working together with EasyBuild over the years we’ve been able to highlight industry best practices into the product which has given us additional functionality.
What are the benefits/notable results you’ve seen from the ERP technology?
One of my objectives was to try to get away with 50 different CVR (cost value Reconciliation) sheets and have all of that information embedded within EasyBuild. We can now enter our accrued income and our cost accruals all through the CVR entry screening in EasyBuild.
Since EasyBuild has been acquired by The Access Group, we
now have access to other products like ConQuest Estimating software, which can now help us with our forecasting process.With these additional offerings, I feel in the future we can adapt the way we work to give us more added value.
Easybuild has allowed us to line-up next to our profit & loss performance the debt that was outstanding against each of those projects. It’s really good to see is how much money you’re owed on a project in real-time, whether it be unbilled sales in the form of accrued income or billed sales.
You can look at your cash tie-up in conjunction with your turnover and profitability. So, what i try and get our board members to do is read the report from right to left – a paid pound of profit is an earned pound of profit. We’re able to effectively press a button, it drops down and it all works very smoothly.
Also, when you’re looking at your turnover to complete on different projects, you can then start to attribute that to where you are with your order bank/work pipeline – you can forecast even further into the future based on your ongoing projects.
These are all tools that move us away from unreliable spreadsheets. All our information is in one place and all our directors have access to EasyBuild.
I think the biggest opportunity is around what we want to do with forecasting and that is inexplicably linked to the way we bid and tender work.
