RedSky

Mabey Bridge is part of the Mabey Group, a private group of companies with a turnover of £150 Million and approaching 1,000 employees. Mabey Bridge has a turnover of £70 Million and 400 employees. Based in Chepstow, South Wales, UK, its history dates back to the construction of Brunel’s Wye railway bridge in 1849.

Mabey Bridge operates out of two Divisions. The UK Division supplies, paints and erects high quality steelwork for bridges, sign gantries, monopiles, wind turbine towers and other heavy structures in the UK and Eire. The International Division markets the company’s innovative range of pre-engineered modular steel panel bridge and car park systems worldwide.

The company’s highly automated fabrication facility operates 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, 50 weeks per annum, and has an annual production capacity of 30,000 tonnes.

Client Profile

Steelwork Constructor

As the leading contractor in its sector, Mabey Bridge recognised that to stay ahead of the game it must improve its data management system.

Mabey Bridge suffered from the usual issues of having a number of different systems that did not talk to each other which meant apart from having to multi process the same data into different applications by the time this had been done the resulting information was by then out of date.

A project was created to research the market named CARMA (Contract Accounting Reporting & MAnagement) Kim Berry was then appointed as the Project Manager for this process and

the implementation of the chosen solution.

The Prime motive was to get fast and accurate Contract Reporting and manage income expenditure of contracts. Mabey Bridge wanted a partner that had a good track record in delivering systems in the contracting market, was stable, and could be a long term partner.

Key functionality was multicurrency; ability to integrate to their MRP system and partner that was pro active.

A total of 11 systems were then shortlisted to 4 then 2 and after extensive reviews and reference visits RedSky IT solution of Summit was selected.

Mabey Bridge Integrates Key business Processes with Summit

“Our goal was to implement a Contract management system, not just an accounts solution. Our chosen solution must help us manage the Contract Lifecycle”

Kim Berry, Mabey Bridge Project Manager

“We have never been able to see in one place the financial position of the contract before. Summit gives us this and is a joy to use. Our target for payback on the Summit solution with the gained efficiencies on time and productivity is 2 years, we are currently on track to achieve this” Kim Berry Project Director

Mabey Bridge

Sector - Steelworks Founded - 1849

Employees - 400 Turnover - £70 million

Solutions Used - Summit 5000

About RedSky ITRedSky IT is a market leader within Construction, providing IT solutions to over 1300 companies including 40% of the top 100 contractors, 14 of the top 50 AEC consultants and many hundreds of small and medium sized businesses. With over 30 years’ experience, we offer a complete portfolio of software solutions to help construction, contracting, house building and professional services firms manage their operations.

Mabey Bridge did not want to pursue the project with any company that had “bolt on’s” to a general accounts system package as previous experience of this meant they were wary of getting true integration and the expertise, knowledge to support them.

Kim explained the criteria for selecting a solution:

“We were using a generic Microsoft Finance system and were not convinced that bolting on modules was the way to go. We needed a solution that was designed for the contracting industry with a partner that was willing to provide interaction with our manufacturing process solution so we could tie the data together, Summit from RedSky IT was the best choice. We had no worries about the company. We like the Products flexibility on the contract enquiry screen where we can define our own views and easily dump data into to excel. And the ability to share tables in SQL for MRP integration along with the Summit screen form designer was the wow factor for us!”

The Mabey Bridge financial system did not have any Subcontractor or Contract Management modules, so over the years a number of spreadsheets and other databases had developed, by the time these had been manually updated, it typically took 5 days to reconcile the contract costs at month end, and therefore the information was always out of date. Because of the different solutions being used, they were unable to drill down behind the summary figures. This was labour intensive and costly in overhead of time

Once the reconciliation process had been done it then took 4 man days each month to generate the reports after consolidating all the data from different system. This was also a static report with no drill down.

The introduction of Summit across the business has now given them the ability to only enter data once which is then available to those that need to see it.

Integration to the MRP solution, Visual Manufacturing, was managed by using the SQL database to import orders, GRN’s (Goods Received Notes), Static supplier data and employee time spent raised on any project from the MRP system every half hour in to Summit. The postings are controlled and managed via both the SQL data base and Summit import / journal functions which means they are only ever entered once into the system thus achieving a huge saving in time and errors.

Project managers can now look at the contract enquiry screen and see immediately the position of their jobs showing outstanding information such as Committed Costs, Delivered Costs, Real Costs, Labour Costs, Valuations, and Sales etc with the ability to drill down behind these to transactions as required. All of this data can be accessed either in the office or remotely via VPN connections.

RedSky IT have also worked with Mabey Bridge to introduce an automated spreadsheet function that allows the Contract Managers to live held in Summit, they can then add their own allowances (internal valuations) and post back directly into Summit for viewing on the contract data. This function also allows full drill down into Summit from within the excel spreadsheet, with all security levels being recognized from Summit.

The implementation process has been a true partnership with Kim acting as the customer Project Manager and liaising with the RedSky IT Project Manager to ensure that the project was delivered on time and within budget.

Client Profile - Mabey Bridge > RedSky IT

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