Business Objects Customers: Sukut Construction

Sukut Construction

"This program saved us a million dollar investment in a new ERP package."

Mike Crawford, President & CEO
Sukut Construction

Challenge

Headquartered in Santa Ana, Sukut Construction is California's largest mass excavation and grading contractor, moving 150 million cubic yards of earth a year. Sukut is nationally recognized for its work on residential developments, golf courses, storm water drainage systems, landfill construction and environmental cleanups, landslide stabilization, and heavy highway construction.

With more than 600 employees and 30 major projects, Sukut’s 2006 revenue exceeded $250 million. In recent years, Sukut Construction has garnered more than 30 industry honors, including the Contractor of the Year, and Best Company To Work For awards. Sukut Construction is part of the Sukut family of companies, which also includes Sukut Equipment, Sukut Development and Chandler Real Properties LP. Sukut Equipment works closely with Sukut Construction to provide equipment for mass grading projects and large water drainage structures and piping systems.

Manual Reporting

Consistent with many fast growing, mid-sized enterprises, Sukut operates with a lean IT department which results in a small team of analysts outside IT responsible for supplying company executives, divisional presidents, and project managers with reports from Sukut’s JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. "From a BI perspective, our biggest issue was getting information out of our ERP package," confirms controller Jim Behrens. "Either we extracted the data from the ERP system and manually entered it into Excel spreadsheets and e-mailed them, or we printed out the reports and faxed or mailed them. We spent too much time and money on accessing and distributing business information and there was always the worry about manual errors."

Poor Access to ERP Data

Steve Moua, a cost engineer at Sukut, printed out a 150 to 300 page job cost report 3 times a month for over 30 project managers, 6 divisional presidents and other company executives. He manually divided the job cost report by Project Manager and faxed or e-mailed them to the right recipients.

"With thousands of dollars invested every day for labor, equipment, and materials in the field, it’s crucial to have accurate and timely information for project managers to maximize productivity on the job site and avoid cost overruns," he says. "The job cost report is our most critical report for providing that information, but by the time it reached everyone, the data was already out of date. With no drill-down capabilities, managers’ ability to analyze the information was limited. We had the data in our ERP system, we just needed to streamline its delivery to people in a format they found useful."

Other key reports, like the income statement, balance sheet, and equipment summary report were also difficult to create and deliver. To provide the Sukut family of companies with their financial reports, staff accountant Monica Delgado, spent hours every month printing out the income statement and balance sheet and copying them for managers, division presidents, and upper level executives. It took Analyst Gerty Reyes a day and a half every month to put together a profit/loss equipment summary report that shows the month to date and year to date activities for the company’s large fleet of equipment. "I downloaded and manipulated the data in Excel to get it in the format the equipment division president wanted," she says. "And if certain costs looked like they needed further investigation, I’d have to find the invoice for back up. Drill down capabilities would really have helped."

Behrens concluded that the current reporting process at Sukut was not a sustainable long-term strategy for the company and fell short of meeting their reporting objectives for the following reasons:

The same tedious manual report preparation process had to be repeated every month
The process was error prone and managers often question the integrity of information delivered in the spreadsheets
Reports were static and did not allow managers the ability to drilldown into the information to answer questions on their own, which resulted in additional phone calls to the finance department requesting reasons for budget overruns or even worse, people didn't take the time to ask questions so questions went unanswered and unsolved
There was no file management system or central repository for reports sent via email and when people needed to track down information from the past, the finance team would be asked to re-print old reports
Report providers were also analysts, but because of the manual process of entering and formatting data in spreadsheets, the finance team did not have any time to analyze information
Many time the analysts had to work late nights manually inputting information into staff reports to meet deadlines

Working with 100's of standard, inflexible reports from JD Edwards and trying to locate the right information in JD Edwards to answer the specific questions posed by Sukut’s management was a continual challenge for the company. "It got to the point that people started complaining about our ERP system," recalls Behrens. "The limited reporting capabilities provided from the ERP led us to begin looking at different ERP packages and that's when we found the answer to our problem."

Approach

It turned out that the different ERP systems evaluated by Behrens and his team all had limited reporting capabilities, so even switching to a new ERP would not necessarily resolve our business challenge regarding information. "I realized that Business Objects BI products provided exactly what we were looking for in a new ERP system, and by implementing Business Objects as a central repository for delivering information to all managers, we could change our ERP in the future and not impact the way our managers view corporate information." recalls Behrens. "It looked like this one product could solve a lot of the reporting and analytical issues we were having, at the same time providing us with capabilities we were interested in for the future, like dashboarding."

Then the Sukut Finance Team saw a presentation by Adam Crigger, President of Preferred Strategies, a partner of Business Objects. They were impressed with the company’s cost-effective, customized business intelligence solution designed to help JD Edwards customers get up and running quickly with a Business Objects Edge Series BI solution. Preferred Strategies’ BI Quick Launch for JDE QuickStart Pack is targeted at mid-market JD Edwards customers who need quick time to value.

"We chose Business Objects Edge Series for its attractive price and rich functionality," says Behrens. "We partnered with Preferred Strategies to take advantage of their BI Quick Launch for JDE QuickStart Pack. It saved us years of learning how to make sense of cryptic JD Edwards data model and the creation of thousands of formulas and calculations required to accelerate getting top quality reports out to management."

Quick Time to Value

Preferred Strategies installed Business Objects Edge Series and BI Quick Launch for JDE QuickStart Pack in 8 hours and used its report templates and samples to deploy some initial Sukut departmental reports in one day. After installation, Sukut attended Preferred Strategies training program which consisted of Certified Business Objects training performed on-site at Sukut using their JD Edwards data using the BI Quick Launch for JDE. Then Preferred Strategies worked with Sukut’s analysts to build the job cost, income statement, balance sheet and equipment summary reports. "With the QuickStart Pack templates, Preferred Strategies made the JD Edwards tables and formulas user friendly for us to develop our reports," says Moua.

"We were very impressed with Sukut’s first run at BI," adds Crigger "They had a vision: they didn’t want hundreds of simple reports out of the gate that would cost money in long-term maintenance, instead they wanted a handful of heavily parameterized powerful reports with lots of drill down. Consistent with how we like to see customers approach reporting, we worked one-on-one to help them design their reports in a fashion that would achieve their objectives while saving them time and money in the future."

Long Term Benefits

The partnership brought other benefits. The Preferred Strategies team ensured that Sukut’s Crystal Reports didn’t mimic JD Edwards' canned reports, but brought extra value to the information they had in their ERP system, and they left Sukut’s analysts with a considerably greater understanding of how to leverage JD Edwards with a newly acquired expertise in creating Edge Series reports, and ad hoc queries and analysis of JD Edwards—all while saving the company time and money. By providing Sukut with a reporting solution tied directly to Sukut's live JD Edwards data, Preferred Strategies offered an affordable alternative to creating a data warehouse. This lowers the cost of report development, as expensive consultants or IT resources are not needed to help get vital information out of JD Edwards and into the hands of managers.

"Each of our reports began as a report template or sample in Preferred Strategies’ BI Quick Launch for JDE QuickStart Pack," says Delgado. "Today, we have four business critical reports with rich analytics that we can schedule for Web-based delivery across the enterprise. Down the road, we have the capabilities for dashboarding and Web-based queries. We couldn’t have achieved all this without Business Objects and Preferred Strategies."

Results

Since deploying the BI Quick Launch for JDE QuickStart Pack, Sukut management is no longer thinking about purchasing another ERP system. Instead, the company achieved the business reporting functionality they wanted at a fraction of the price. With enterprise-wide delivery and on demand access, everyone is using these reports to gain insight into the company’s business performance. As a result, it’s easier to align Sukut corporate staff and departments towards achieving corporate goals

Behrens recalls, after being trained how to use the Business Objects web portal to access reports, Mike Crawford, President & CEO suggested "This program saved us a million dollar investment in a new ERP package." "With Business Objects, we solved a top priority business issue-delivering business data to employees to shed a clear light on our business performance and financial status-without having to change our underlying systems. As far as the users are concerned, they now have a state-of-the-art BI solution. No one is complaining about JD Edwards anymore" says Behrens.

Sukut employees are using their new BI platform to achieve the following benefits:

Better access to ERP data. "Business Objects Edge combined with the Preferred Strategies BI Quick Launch for JDE delivered the keys we were looking for to unlock the information stored in JD Edwards and empower people throughout Sukut to use information to make more informed business decisions. We used to waste many hours preparing monthly reports for managers which are now completed in minutes" said Behrens. Managers and executives gain the power to transform the business with on-demand access to Crystal Reports that are published on the company’s intranet. "Today we know that everyone has access to the same data, at the same time,” says Moua. “This keeps us all on the same page, improves business planning, and promotes coordinated response to issues as they arise. Now that I refresh my job cost reports every hour, our project managers are getting current information for the first time."
Improved analytics. With flexible built-in parameters and drill down capabilities, Sukut managers are analyzing the data contained in the income statement to see clearly what decisions must be made to save money and optimize company profitability. "They can drill into different department’s revenues and expenses for a comparative analysis, or click on a line item to see the general ledger transactions that make up a whole year’s worth of expenses and revenues," says Delgado.

The job cost report offers different levels of analysis for different levels of management, down to the fine details, like individual line items of an accounts payable invoice. "User-friendly, self serve analysis of ERP data empowers everyone to answer their own questions and to work more productively," adds Moua. "I no longer have project managers in my office, asking me what the numbers mean."
Better Business Decisions. With on demand access to critical project data in the job cost report, project managers can make better decisions to reduce the possibility of project cost over runs. "Our Business Objects BI solution could save millions of dollars, when you think of the costs involved running 20 or 30 scrapers at $250/hr on a typical job site," says Moua. "Now our project managers can make decisions on current data and see their itemized unit cost within each project. They can pass those numbers down to their foremen so they can continually evaluate and fine tune operations in the field to save money and at the same time provide value engineering to their clients. Business Objects' BI tools help to enlighten everyone with access to rock-solid data so we can decide how to streamline processes and working better together to achieve overall business strategies. That's bound to make a difference to our bottom line."

Customers In The Spotlight

Sukut Construction

Challenge

Approach

Results

Quick Facts