Sage helps bring efficiency improvements to Apollo Group

Monday, 3 August 2009

Founded in 1976, Apollo Property Services Group has over 30 years’ experience working within the Public Sector and currently turns over around £300 million per annum. Today, as one of the largest companies in its sector, Apollo offers a fully integrated range of property services from planned and responsive maintenance for individual properties through to complete estate regeneration and the construction of award-winning schools and key community buildings.

Paul Richardson, Apollo’s Information and Technology Director, explains that there were three
key drivers in the decision to select a new financial and contract management system: “Firstly, we
wanted to remove the duplication of work caused through having disparate pools of data. Secondly, we wanted a flexible reporting tool that could be used by reasonably senior staff to enable data to be easily extracted and presented up to Board level. Finally, we wanted a solution that fitted with our other Microsoft–based corporate applications.”

Steven King, Financial Controller at Apollo, comments: “Now, by having our financial, commercial and reporting data within a single integrated solution, the data only needs to be entered once and the rest of the process is automated using Excel-based reports - the Commercial teams enter the
CVR’s and the rest is seamless. For us, this means more quality time can be afforded to high level review because we no longer need to check for human errors in spreadsheets caused by
manually transferring data from one system to another.”

Having data residing in a single system also makes reporting simple. Steven King goes on to say: “Historically we found the extraction of financial information from our predecessor system incredibly cumbersome…Now we use a simple reporting tool in Excel which links intuitively with Sage Construction’s EVision. Our reports are now set out exactly as we want them, and contain charts and graphs which are prepared and updated automatically for us. Now we have EVision, general accessibility of data is excellent.”

EVision’s integration with other Microsoft-based applications was an important factor in the selection of this software. Paul Richardson comments: “Apollo uses SharePoint and so we wanted an SQL-based software solution that would link with this. Both SharePoint and EVision have Microsoft at their core so we plan to take full advantage of the available data links to gather information from EVision for publishing across the business through our in-house intranet platform.”

Paul Richardson also acknowledges the high quality service provided by EVision’s support staff. “We had a member of the EVision support team on site with us for 20 days after go-live which helped to ensure everything ran incredibly smoothly…This professional and responsive service has been maintained since being transferred across to regular remote-based telephone support.”

Furthermore, Steven King strongly believes that EVision will continue to generate internal efficiencies in administrative tasks: “Over the last two years the Group has grown turnover by over 40%, yet we have not needed to increase the size of our finance department. The implementation of EVision has been a major contributing factor to efficiency improvements in our key financial and commercials processes.”

Sage Construction

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