Rebuilding Enterprise Systems From the Ground Up Leads to Flexibility and Full-Spectrum Visibility
There is an art to taking an extremely complex enterprise project and building a thoroughly streamlined solution. That’s exactly what Stoneridge was able to accomplish with this multi-conglomerate parent company, APi Group. With more than forty industrial, fire protection, and specialty construction companies under the corporate umbrella, there were multiple legacy ERP solutions across the organization that required modernization and consolidation. This project required identifying and removing unnecessary processes and developing customized solutions for myriad essential business processes.
Ineffective ERP solutions that have been cobbled together over the course of years are not uncommon. In fact, we virtually see it every day. Well-intentioned “fixes” are put in place over time but inevitably lead to the disintegration of productivity and results.
For APi, piecemeal solutions created over the course of many years blocked effective insight into project tracking and financial data. Across the companies many entities, details were spread across multiple legacy solutions, preventing management from having a clear line of sight into essential information about their rapidly growing, global business. They knew they were missing opportunities and leaving money on the table with their inefficient systems.
With more than a billion dollars in highly complex construction projects every year, they needed internal systems that would provide exceptional management visibility and control across the entire spectrum. APi Group’s internal goals at the outset of this project were to establish a foundation for the next 20 plus years across one business platform, one common set of roles and processes and one business language.
This project had an initial focus on project management, accounting, and payroll. It required that APi’s business processes to become hyper-streamlined so that costs could be restrained, productivity increased, time to results accelerated, and the business could be poised so that their technology investment kept up with their growth and rapidly changing technological innovations.
The final solution, built by Stoneridge Software, is one platform to accommodate multi-company, multi-currency, sophisticated project services network that seamlessly incorporates third-party systems, and takes advantage of advanced projects, equipment tracking, union payroll, and financial control. This customized solution accommodates multiple business types, construction, and non-construction, and provides users across the enterprise the ability create projects, track costs and margins, fully understand job profitability, and efficiently maintain data.
- Replaced outdated technology across multiple companies
- Provided visibility across multiple companies and locations
- Project Services
- Financial control
- Cost Analysis & Revenue Recognition
- WIP/Project Reporting
- Month-end tie-out including job cost
- Equipment Tracking (i.e. project site, warehouse, worker level)
This project was complex and required deep expertise and competencies across several members of the Stoneridge team, including expertise in:
- Construction
- Financials
- Union Payroll
- Projects
- Inventory
- Order processing
- Sales taxation
The ability to “right-size” functionality for the diverse-sized businesses under their parent company umbrella was a key factor in choosing the platform choice. The client was thrilled to find one enterprise solution in Dynamics AX that works for all of their needs, and a partner in Stoneridge with the skills and project management approach to facilitate such a multifaceted implementation. These were critical factors in the positive outcome.
