As one of the largest and longest-serving providers of staffing, facility management, maintenance and care services, this essential operations provider employs over 30,000 people and works with around 10,000 clients across Australia and New Zealand.
With a regional strategy supported by local expertise and capability, the company works in partnership with many of Australia and New Zealand’s leading businesses across all major industries including mining and resources, oil and gas, government and defence, education, aviation, health, infrastructure, manufacturing, transport and logistics.
Business challenge
Having grown by acquisition, the company has absorbed a number of ageing, disparate systems that were complicating the company’s ability to deliver vital commercial processes in conjunction with their clients’ operating systems.
The Business Systems Manager for the company’s Facility Management Division says that the company needed to replace its legacy on-premise systems with cloud-based solutions to ensure the business had a platform for future workplace modernization. He adds, "the key business driver was our need to increase efficiencies when working with our clients."
"The workarounds the organization needed to perform on the old system were impacting business operations and staff performance. Our legacy applications were forcing us to do a lot of manual workarounds, requiring extra people, extra keystrokes and preventing easy integration with our clients’ systems. It is essential that we can work in a streamlined manner and therefore we needed to modernize and improve our integration capabilities," says the company’s Head of Facility Management.
Another key challenge with its different legacy applications was compliance. “We were struggling with regulatory approvals and other compliance prerequisites. We do a lot of work for government agencies and must adhere to the necessary regulations.”
The company also wanted to provide live data to their field staff. With people working in remote locations across Australia and New Zealand, it was vital that they could communicate information in real time for efficient use of time and resources.
Solution
The essential operations provider opted to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 to transform its business systems and selected DXC Technology to undertake the work because, as the Head of Facility Management explains, it needed a partner with sufficient size and bandwidth to complete a large scale program of work.
“One of the big reasons we chose Microsoft Dynamics was to have a vertically integrated business system where all the various elements of our activities, including finance, procurement, operations, and sales and marketing, could work together,” says the Head of Facility Management.
“And we chose DXC because they are experts in making the integrations work seamlessly and configuring the system in such a way that allows us to capitalise on all its features and functional capabilities,” he adds.
Along with a common platform across the business, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 cloud-based ERP solution provides the company with increased compliance and security. The DXC Practice for Microsoft implemented enterprise asset maintenance as part of the solution, including Microsoft’s Field Service Mobility application that allows service technicians to see and update their work orders on-site at a job.
“Various information elements from our work orders need to be processed into the financial system, and our field workers need to access the system live from anywhere within Australia or New Zealand.”
Results and benefits
The Business Systems Manager says the company is already benefitting from the integrated solution, experiencing increased business process automation and improved security. “We have implemented enhancements around vendor onboarding and enabled various workflow components to improve customer engagement.”
Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows the staff to work across a common platform, enabling them to work remotely from anywhere, says the Head of Facility Management. “We have met all our critical requirements for asset management but also added extra functionality and process improvements across the business’s preventative and asset maintenance components.
“As we get more familiar with the system, I expect we will experience greatly improved efficiencies compared to our legacy systems.” He adds, "the new solution will create new opportunities for the company and put it in a position to win contracts for future work. We are reaping a range of business and IT benefits thanks to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the support of the DXC team.”
