If you’ve transited through an airport terminal, walked past any towering office complex, marvelled at new buildings on a university campus or driven on a just-completed section of freeway, you’ve experienced the complex world of large-project construction management.

Companies that specialise in large-scale construction management typically maintain a roster of thousands of vendor companies across the US that they trust to deliver their projects. As is standard for the construction industry, vendors bill the construction management company, which then bills the client. In turn, the client pays the construction management company, which passes along payment to its vendors. The amount of data generated on one massive-scale project is almost beyond comprehension.

An invoice can sometimes include hundreds of pages of backup information. Client payment for each invoice must be clearly linked to the appropriate project and vendor. The management company reconciles the financial transactions and forwards payment to the vendor, retaining its fee. Now multiply that complexity by the number of projects underway at any one time. When one top US construction management company decided to deploy a new system capable of handling more projects at once, allowing it to grow its operations, the company knew it needed to partner with a team capable of understanding what it needed and performing without fail.

When evaluating potential technology partners, the company scrutinised each for their ability to deliver a system that would provide accurate, precise payable tracking, rapid and intuitive payment capability, user efficiency and time savings, all at scale. One of the biggest risk factors was the ability to pay vendors accurately and on time throughout any change in payment system, because vendor relationships are at the core of the company’s business success.

After a deep analysis, the company selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations as the foundation for the new system and enlisted Avanade to customise and optimise it for the company’s specific enterprise requirements.

Dynamics 365 F&O contains many of the core components required for both revenue and disbursements, as well as construction-specific financial practises:

• “Pay when paid,” to manage cash flow 
• Cost recovery for both payroll and non-payroll project costs 
• Procurement 
• Payroll integration 
• Project initiation 
• Project accounting and project billing

Avanade’s project team worked with the company to tie all the required components together, as well as integrate a new financial management system with a new payroll system that was being implemented in parallel for payroll cost recovery.

Since deployment, the company particularly values its increased visibility into the real-time costs of each project, as well as a new automated system that reads each invoice, inserts the details into the F&O system and makes it easier to route the invoice to the appropriate project for improved financial planning and cost recovery. And because it’s now on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, the company is positioned to handle any future growth and will continue to benefit from Dynamics’ built-in security and on-going capability advancements.

Perhaps the most important benefit of all comes from executing the project according to the company’s complex requirements. “Our team is driven to help our clients achieve their business objectives, the ones that matter the most to them," says Andrew Blevins, Avanade industry lead. "In this case, we also have the additional satisfaction of knowing that when we drive by that big new data center or fly out of that airport, that we had a small part in making it happen.”

Elevate customer engagement, service and business operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP, CRM and our award-winning Microsoft expertise.