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Toronto, Ontario, Canada Read full version

Avenue Road Roofing (ARR) has been in business in the Greater Toronto Area since 1975. The company provides re-roofing services to the residential, commercial and industrial sectors, specializing in roofing, building envelope, maintenance and repairs. Avenue Road Roofing is a key player in the GTA, with more than 40,000 residential and commercial clients and over 200 employees.

Specific condition

After experiencing considerable growth in the past few years, Avenue Road Roofing had decided to enhance its internal processes and business management tools to improve profitability and customer service. Given the company’s highly specialized process, for which they had developed several custom software applications, this would be a challenge.

It’s easy to see why when you look at the process, step by step:

• ARR’s call centre had a staff of 10-20 employees during its busy season to receive calls generated by various marketing activities.
• Each call was manually recorded into Blues, a lead management system.
• These leads were manually allocated to salespeople based on their territories.
• Salespeople arranged on-site meetings with prospective clients, where they assessed the potential work and prepared a proposal.
• Upon client acceptance, the lead information from Blues and the quote/proposal information were manually entered into Central Files (CF), another system.
• Information from Blues, CF and the quote was disseminated to both accounting and production.
• Production manually created purchase orders and managed scheduling or work.
• Accounting set up customer accounts, created deposit invoices and prepared the final billing.
• Information manually flowed between accounting and production until the job was complete and fully paid.

This process involved a great deal of duplication and made tracking details difficult across multiple systems. In addition, ARR was also experiencing significant inventory shrinkage. Determining the cause of this shrinkage was difficult because there were no automated inventory flow records at the time.

Based on this analysis, ARR determined that, in order to improve process efficiency, reduce inventory shrinkage and, in turn, obtain more profitability, the current management tools were no longer efficient and had to be replaced. Avenue Road Roofing wanted more control over its processes, enhanced access to customer information and a smooth transition for their sales and production teams.

Maestro solutions

Maestro’s combination of project-based job costing, general accounting, payroll and integrated contact management provided an excellent base for a single solution that would fully integrate ARR’s business processes. Upon further analysis, it was determined that additional functionality would be added to the maestro* solution to enhance the CRM requirements of ARR’s call centre. With this enhancement, maestro* now contained the functionality required to manage ARR’s business processes from the receipt of a lead/call to billing in a single solution that would not require duplication of data entries. Additionally, implementing maestro*’s inventory and purchase management features gave ARR a clear picture of all inventory movement throughout the company. The inventory tracking would allow ARR to monitor and correct inventory shrinkage issues and provide plenty of information when negotiating purchases with suppliers.

Maestro*’s solution had the potential to affect all aspects of ARR’s business. Implementing change on this scale might prove to be too disruptive. To manage the impact of the software implementation and business process changes, the implementation was broken down into smaller, more manageable parts:

• Phase 1 involved transitioning the Blues and CF databases to maestro*’s CRM. This would bring the call centre online and streamline the process of recording and managing new business opportunities.
• Phase 2 involved accounting functionality upgrades. This would lead to the integration of CRM with Projects and Budgets. Purchase orders, payables and receivables would be entered manually. Eventually, customer invoices and supplier purchase orders will be generated automatically according to the quote information stored in the CRM.
• Phase 3 involved bringing payroll online within maestro*. With payroll online, ARR can now capture labour usage to projects for costing and have this information automatically forwarded to payroll for processing.

Future phases will include bringing production online to manage the scheduling and execution of work. This will allow ARR to see the status of all projects and automatically generate various controls, such as material purchase orders and installer schedules.

Clients’ benefits

• Quick access to historical customer data has sharpened Avenue Road’s competitive edge. Market segments can now be easily targeted and past customers can be proactively serviced for long-term maintenance.
• ARR did not experience any disruption to daily operations during the implementation process, a very important fact to consider. Technology can be very intimidating, but Maestro’s personalized approach helped smooth the way. This is a key success factor when performing an implementation of this magnitude.
• The Customer Relation Management (CRM) has the ability to source information very quickly. ARR has a number of operators at its call centre. Operators now have access to detailed history, which allows them to project a more personal touch. It’s a clear advantage to have an operator speak to customers with relevant information in hand.
• ARR is now able to provide a higher level of security for sensitive customer credit card and financial information.
• New sales are now automatically transferred from sales to accounting to production. This improves the quality and speed of information flowing throughout the company. This also eliminates redundant data entry and reduces the need for additional resources.
• Team efficiencies can be analyzed in detail, allowing employees to continually learn and improve in an objective manner. ARR and its clients both benefit from this development.
• ARR also benefits from improved financials, smarter, faster decisions and greater efficiency—on top of better customer service, higher customer confidence and more control over its business processes.

Read the interview with Craig Bennett and Kathy Hill