Speaker: Peter Ritter, CFO, Akura Pty Ltd
What challenges did you face before using Premier, and how has Premier helped you overcome them?
Peter Ritter: Prior to using Premier, Akura used a combination of my and Excel to manage our accounts. Unfortunately, what that meant was, everything was very slow and manual from a process point of view and the business wasn't scalable. Since implementation of Premier, Akura has grown sixfold from a revenue point of view and increased its margin percentage along the way. Premier has assisted Akura in doing that through providing great visibility over the performance of individual jobs. Through the centrality of the jobs function within Premier, all costs and revenues are tied against that job, so we can undersee, understand and see early on if there's any challenges with the project, and address them before they become bigger issues. We do that through monthly forecasting in the job forecast screen, and it's critical, in a month end process.
Why did you choose Premier over your previous software and others on the market?
Peter Ritter: When Akura went down the path of looking for an integrated ERP software for our construction business, we went through a bit of an exercise to understand what was out on the market, and what value each of those systems brought. We looked at JobPac, we looked at Cheops, and we also looked at Premier. And what we found as we analyzed all of those was that Premier provided the greatest value for money, and certainly satisfied all the requirements that we had at the time.
What Premier features do you rely on daily, and how do they improve your business?
Peter Ritter: There are a number of features within Premier that Akura uses on a daily, weekly, monthly basis which are quite critical to us. First one is probably the job forecasting function. It's something that is critical to our month-end process and helps us understand how we're tracking on each project, so every month we run through that process, for the Project Manager to understand what the challenges are, what the wins are, what the losses are on a line by line basis, on trade by trade basis. That helps us improve the profitability of our business and also understand underperforming projects earlier on so that we can potentially nip in the bud any ability that we have on that job. Another function that we use is the workflow approvals, purchase orders, invoices, they're all aligned with our limits of authority within our business. And that helps us keep control around that cost base. Subpay apps is also a function that we use all the time. All the subcontractors that we use on our projects run through the subpay apps portal. We find that very useful, particularly from a SOPA point of view. And these functions and features of Premier enable us to have a greater visibility around the performance of the business, closer to real time. What that means is, As the construction industry gets more and more scrutiny around businesses going under. When we're doing projects for larger companies, quite often their finance companies will want to do a greater level of DD on their builder, and that means that Akura comes under greater scrutiny, and to be able to provide those financiers with up to-date, valid current reports it's been beneficial to us with potentially winning some jobs as well.
What advice would you give to companies thinking about transitioning to Premier?
Peter Ritter: To companies who are thinking of transitioning to Premier, the advice I'll give you is, see if you can go and visit a company that's already using Premier and understand how they use it in their day to day and how that would be beneficial compared to what you're currently doing, whether you're not using any integrated ERP or whether you are using another construction-based one, to understand how it can actually help you in your day to day and what, what difference it would make for your business and what reporting you're able to get out of that.
