Delivering the best service to your clients within your budgetary constraints

Service providers delivering maintenance, engineering and other technical services to asset-intensive industries need the right financial management and procurement systems and processes in place to address the specific business needs of their industry. The delivery of high levels of service and well-maintained equipment to clients across the energy and mining industries is paramount, but this must be achieved whilst keeping tight control of budgets.

A financial management system that addresses the specific needs of the service industry should include:

• Full visibility of spend for each client
• It’s essential to have a central and consistent view of material, equipment and labour costs across the organisation in an easily accessible financial management system. This system should also allow you to allocate these costs to individual clients.

Flexible SLAs and billing
The system must also be flexible to address the full range of commercial models, contracts and service level agreements (SLAs) agreed with your clients.

Timely billing
Minimising time to invoice is critical. The system should automate and streamline billing while improving cash flow and avoiding costly errors.

Support for global operations
In order to deliver services globally, the system must have multi-language and multi-currency capabilities and address regional financial and taxation regulations.

The Progressive Solution
Progressive TSL have been implementing financial management and procurement solutions to the Energy and Mining sectors since 2004. These systems are used widely across the industry and by the organisations that service these industries. Progressive’s clients include Sparrows Group, a global provider of specialist equipment and integrated engineering services to the energy industry, please read more about Sparrows Group Purchase to Pay solution below.

Progressive are Gold Partners with global technology leaders Infor (Infor SunSystems), Hexagon (HxGN EAM – formerly Infor EAM) and IBM (Maximo). Their financial management and procurement solutions for the services industry are based on these best-in-class systems overlaid with Progressive’s own industry frameworks. The Progressive solution delivers these key features to service providers:

• Full visibility of material and labour costs – with the option to assign to individual clients
• Automated accounting and billing
• Streamlined, auditable Purchase to Pay processing
• Financial approvals via mobile devices
• Flexible operational and financial processing (to reflect the contractual needs of each client)
• Multi-country capabilities

Progressive TSL in action at Sparrows Group

Sparrows Group were looking for a Purchase to Pay (P2P) solution that integrated with their existing Infor SunSystems accounting system and offered inventory, contracts management, tender management, and workflow. The solution also needed to be multi-language and multi-currency to support their global operations.

Sparrows Group selected the Progressive Purchase to Pay solution based on HxGN EAM (formally Infor EAM), a leading Enterprise Asset Management platform, for its rich functionality, meeting all their requirements. Progressive applied their best practice EAM framework, enabling a quick implementation without the need for extensive customisation.

Brian Docherty, Head of IT & Facilities, Sparrows Group, commented:
“Progressive has helped Sparrows Group to deliver a number of tangible cost savings through their Purchase to Pay solution. Many of our manual processes have now been automated, and the mobile solution provides approval access wherever people are working from. We look forward to the next phase of our global roll-out with Progressive.”

Sparrows Group Purchase to Pay case study

Sparrows Group is a global provider of specialist equipment and integrated engineering services to the energy industry. Working throughout the asset life cycle, they deliver optimised performance, reliability and safety of critical equipment and people to their customers.

Background

Sparrows Group were looking for a best of breed Purchase to Pay (P2P) solution, including Inventory, Contracts Management, Tender Management and Workflow, to optimise their efficiency.

They were previously managing this process using excel spreadsheets without workflow. Low oil prices meant visibility and control of spend, together with demonstrable efficiency savings were key drivers. The new solution had to be multi-language and multi-currency, and had to be able to seamlessly integrate with their existing financial management system, SunSystems.

The Challenge

Sparrows were looking for a best of breed Purchase to Pay solution, including Inventory, Contracts Management, Tender Management and Workflow.

Much of their existing purchasing activity was driven by manual process and spreadsheets. Ability to view information was an issue – it was time-consuming to find items in stock for example, and lack of workflow could cause issues with purchasing requests being consistently checked and approved. Market conditions, specifically low oil prices, mean that cost control, spend visibility and demonstrable efficiency savings were becoming increasingly important.

Sparrows were looking to deliver the project in phases, both in terms of functionality and region – successful deployment in the UK would lead to a global rollout and scalable additions to the EAM functionality. The new solution had to be multi-language and multi-currency to accommodate the global business, and any solution needed to be able to seamlessly integrate with their existing financial management system to ensure that the end-to-end processing was fully automated.

The Solution

Following a competitive procurement process, Sparrows chose Infor EAM with Progressive’s framework, as it offered superior functionality to the other systems considered – it was the only system to demonstrate all requested scenarios out of the box.
Progressive’s best practice EAM framework meant that many of Sparrow’s detailed requirements were met without the need for extensive configuration and customisation. In addition, Progressive’s eInvoicing solution was chosen to reduce the amount of manual work required for invoice entry.

Sparrows worked closely with Progressive during the design and testing phases. A number of design workshops took place at Sparrows’ offices in Aberdeen, where there was good user representation across the full P2P process. During this process, the emphasis was on utilising as much of the Progressive framework as possible – only areas such as hiring, where Sparrows have unique process, were identified as needing additional configuration.

Users were also involved in testing, particularly in User Acceptance Testing (UAT), where these sessions also acted as training for those who would go on and train the Sparrows end users prior to Go Live. Sparrows elected to write their own user guides, based on Progressive templates from our standard framework.

Go Live proved uneventful. 700 transactions were processed in the first week, no major incidents were reported, and users appeared to be up and running with the system quickly. Progressive’s mobile solution has been implemented, allowing all users to view data from the system, view scanned images and make approvals from their mobile devices.

KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Progressive TSL