iTSHOWCASE '08 Construction Software Award Winners Academy

Best Construction Process Management : RedSky IT and Baxall Construction

Baxall Construction is an established medium sized construction company based in Paddock Wood, Kent and operates primarily in London and the South East. Baxall is noted as a name for reliability and performance in the competitive world of Industrial and Commercial Construction, Refurbishment, Specialist House Building and Design and Build projects. Their approach has been to build a solid business with sustained growth but without losing sight of traditional values and methods, or the importance of the personal approach.

The application

As a forward looking company Baxall Construction chose to migrate to the enterprise level fully integrated Summit 5000 product as they could see the clear business benefits of having complete end to end control of the operational as well as financial management of their projects.

Baxall construction has been a long term user of RedSky IT's software since 1993, starting with a text based solution called Micabuild. They migrated to AXiM a fully integrated windows system and have now moved up to RedSky's ERP solution Summit 5000.

The implementation 

The objective of RedSky's "Solution Delivery" approach is to ensure a mutual understanding of the proposed implementation model before we work with the customer to deliver the required business solution and manage the associated change. 

The method for creation of a business solution and subsequent delivery of that solution is managed through their standard five-phase implementation method: Project Definition - Design Solution - Configure Solution - Implement Solution - Go Live.

Each of these phases was managed by our Project Manager to ensure that the project teams remained focused and on track against the project plan. However timescales expanded or reduced according to outside influences.

Baxall Construction are still learning more about the many functions that can add further value to the business and regular update meeting will take place over time to ensure they continue to develop and shape the system to their needs as new and best practice methods will evolve over the years to come.

The benefits

Baxall use the system to manage the complete lifecycle of a contract from estimating, where Summit imports the unpriced bill supplied by the client directly into the system. They then tag this up by trade & send out the subcontractor packages to be priced. The pricing goes back into the system with resource build ups for items they are directly pricing. They then add their overhead & profit adjustments to the bill & submit the priced bill to the client.

Upon winning the job, they use Summit to manage the valuation & variations process. They produce the client & subcontractor valuations which automatically updates the accounts system, creating the subcontractors payment certificate & handles all the CIS requirements. As both the client & subcontractor valuation detail is in the system, Summit then provides the subcontractor liability figures for each subcontract on the project, so at all stages of the project Baxall can see the true profitability.

Baxall use the purchasing functions of Summit to control all their purchasing and matching of invoices. All of the committed, actual costs and sales details feed through into the Contract ledger giving a clear view of the position at any time. Summit's job costed payroll pays the employees & feeds accurate costing to the projects. The general ledger is updated in real time by all the subsidiary ledgers ensuring accurate consolidated financial reporting.

As a single fully integrated system running on an Oracle database (SQL also available) information only needs to be keyed once & is then available throughout the system. The integration with excel has enabled existing excel based management reports to be configured to take live data from the system rather than being manually entered from offline records held by the surveyors.

Customer feedback

Jonathan Exall, Finance Director, says of the system: "We have chosen Summit 5000 because of the total integration that the system offers. From the estimate production through purchasing, quantity surveying and accounts to the final account we are able to monitor the financial performance of a project.

"The detailed feedback of information will enable us to control our costs more closely and improve accuracy of tendering and ultimately increase our profitability."

RedSky IT

RedSky IT has over 30 years experience supplying the construction industry supply chain with over 2000 customers throughout the UK.…