Univerus
We spoke to Brad Atchison, CEO at Univerus, about his experience with Projectworks.
Univerus is an international, customer-centric software solutions company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The company has acquired a family of innovative technology brands, including fieldGO, MAIS, C2Logix, Compliance Science, SmartGridCIS and Energy Hippo. In addition, Univerus offer a multi-purpose user interface named UNITY, a powerful suite of vertical software solutions accessible within one intuitive platform. Their business provides tailored solutions to support local government, sports, recreation, and industries such as construction, utilities, and manufacturing. As part of their business model, it is essential for Univrus to keep up to date with industry trend sand technological innovation. They implement new software features as they are developed to help their customers best manage their organisations.
The team at Univerus prides themselves on their customer-centric approach. Their customer success team works closely with clients to understand their unique challenges and ensure the company delivers a product that meets those needs. Brad Atchison is the Chief Executive Officer at Univerus, and as part of his role, he ensures that operations are running smoothly. This involves working closely with managers to support them in meeting the corporate objectives for growth and profitability.
The Challenge
Univerus understands the value of having all your data in one place from their own software, UNITY. Brad explained that they needed the ability to consolidate their resourcing and expenses to support their ongoing growth. Not having this feature held the company back, as they needed one place to handle all their data to ensure clear communication with their international companies.
“My controller and I were looking for software options because we wanted our whole business to be integrated.”
Double entry was an issue Univerus faced, as their financial system didn’t automatically integrate into the same tools they used to track resources. The team was already using Xero and just needed a way to manage their project financials without entering data into two separate systems. In addition, a challenge for Univerus was not having the function to initiate milestone billing directly from their project management software. This problem became time-consuming for staff and opened up the potential for data to be entered incorrectly.
“We just didn’t want to have double entry. We wanted to be able to initiate milestone billing from the project management software, but we didn’t want to have to then go into financial systems and redo it all over again.”
Lastly, Brad identified that Univerus needed a better system to manage its people. An integral component of Brad’s job is working with managers to ensure they get the most out of their team. However, there was no quantifiable way to measure productivity or identify who was assigned to each task. They needed something to help them understand where the work was happening to make informed business decisions.
After implementing Projectworks, double entry was no longer an issue for Univerus. The Projectworks integration with Xero allowed them to keep their preferred accounting tool and combine it with powerful resourcing and financial management tools. In addition, they can now initiate milestone billing directly from Projectworks, saving them time and mitigating any data inconsistencies. Brad reports that having a consolidated invoice has offered value to their customers due to the time it saves them.
The Solution
“The Xero integration was key and quickly highlighted Projectworks for us. It was just what we were looking for.”
Due to Univerus having several international businesses and their travel plans being interrupted by COVID, they are yet to implement Projectworks for all their companies. However, with the help of the customer success team, the teams using Projectworks have been delighted with the onboarding process and found the transition easy. As a result, they feel confident implementing the software within their other companies soon.
“I’ve enjoyed all my interactions with Projectworks. We had some very specific things we wanted to accomplish when we used the product, and from the initial demo I thought it was pretty good.”
The resource management function of Projectworks has allowed the managers at Univerus to track where the work is being done and report this information to Brad. They can quickly see how their staff members are utilising their time. This function has also improved the hiring process, as now the team can see where resources are straining and where they have more available to assign. As a result, they can better resource their staff rather than potentially unnecessarily hire more people.
“Every business owner always wants to hire, right? If you ask any of them, they always want to hire. But do you need to hire anyone because you’re only at 65% utilisation, and have no backlog? What are you using to justify that hire?”
After introducing Projectworks, the professional service directors do all their day-to-day work in Projectworks, and the finance team oversees their monthly posting. After this, Brad can look over a polished version of their report. This process has allowed him to see from a glance how projects are tracking, what the contract value is, what work is in progress, and what the backlog is.
The Results:
Inter-office collaboration
Platform to manage growth
Better staff utilisation
The team at Univerus is constantly growing and expanding their capabilities, and with Projectworks, they will be able to manage their growth going forward. In addition, they hope to bring Project to all their international businesses, an ongoing process that will help streamline their companies across international borders. We are looking forward to supporting Univerus through their continued expansion.
Ready for the next step?
For more information on how Projectworks can transform your services organization book a demo today.