Learn how general contractors achieve successful ERP in the construction industry.
Learn how general contractors achieve successful ERP in the construction industry.
A specialty construction company in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and West Coast asked RubinBrown to review their ERP system and see how well it supported daily work in the construction industry. The team focused on risk areas and overall readiness to determine whether the system and related processes were helping or slowing down operations, accounting tasks, and basic project management activities. The goal was to understand how to move toward a more successful ERP environment and streamline everyday tasks.
The Executive Leadership Team also requested a clear comparison of major process groups across their two largest customer regions. This helped them understand key differences, identify opportunities for improvement, and optimize workflows across the business. With this insight, the company could plan for more consistent operations and stronger performance across all regions.
Leadership wanted to understand why the two largest regional divisions used such different construction management processes, even though they offered nearly the same construction services. This question became a key focus in the review. This dichotomy of operating processes was impacting strategic decision making in the areas of succession planning, talent rotation, and capital allocation.
The strategic focus was to prioritize the RubinBrown business process blueprinting methodology for the two major operating regions. Leadership requested that each region be blueprinted from a blank canvas to minimize any bias.
Another major issue involved several high-maintenance customers who regularly changed their business requirements and expected full vendor compliance. The client team stayed agile, but these constant changes made the legacy ERP system hard to use. As a result, employees often turned to Excel spreadsheets to complete transactions instead of using the system’s intended automation and controls.
The company works in construction, which is labor intensive. Payroll must be managed for many projects and tax jurisdictions. This created a clear need for a self-service HR portal that could streamline information for craft workers, back-office staff, and managers. A single place for updates would reduce confusion and support smoother daily operations.
The RubinBrown Team interviewed 34 executives, core team members, and Subject Matter Experts to gather a full view of how the organization operated. They then partnered with the client to update the construction Project Administration manual. This work helped modernize and align the manual into a well-structured set of business process workstreams, including:
The RubinBrown team facilitated separate multi-day blueprinting sessions with each of the two regional teams. During the blueprinting sessions, we found 12 Pain Points. These included wasteful processes and technology problems. We logged them for future analysis in Value Workshops.
We built separate Workstream Blueprinting process maps for each region to see how things really worked. The results showed far more similarities than differences. This confirmed what leadership suspected—that most differences were cultural or based on the mix of projects. With that insight, the team could now focus on how to streamline work across both regions.
The team looked at the full technology setup and checked how each application worked with the others. This helped them see which tools needed to integrate more smoothly and where updates were needed. They also reviewed the ERP system and found customizations that created vulnerabilities the company would need to address.
With more than thirty years on three upgraded versions of their current ERP system, leadership chose to stay on the same platform rather than move to a new system. Instead, they decided to take a stronger role in setting expectations for support and in shaping the vendor’s future technology roadmap.
The client’s Steering Committee and Core Team took full advantage of the Critical Success Factor playbook to triage the Pain Points and prioritize a portfolio of projects to address and resolve each one in a structured and timely manner.