Snowy engineering goes real time

The Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC) is currently rolling out a CRM tool globally to better organize tender bidding and subsequent contract win rates.

The engineering design and consultancy firm needed better management of global planning and staff management across 80 locations including Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific.

SMEC selected the CRM Opportunity and Bid Management module from Epicor to structure comprehensive service bids, forecast bookings and revenue and to capture pre-sale costs during tender bids.

The organization is currently deploying the client relation package in Australia, to be implemented over the coming months. The project management and financial system has been running live globally for the last year.

Peter Busbridge, chief executive officer (CEO) of SMEC, said they expect the product to improve contract wins for SMEC.

Busbridge said the company purchased a multi-user licence, and all elements of the package will eventually be rolled out to SMEC subsidiaries.

"It enables us to make a number of strategic advances assisting us to move from working with reactive and historical information systems to one where we can access and create data in real time using facts on the ground," Busbridge said.

"It all started about two years ago when we were going through significant growth and our old system was unable to go across the 80 different countries as we (SMEC) work in different financial years and currencies ... we needed a system to go across very different entities.

"Employees can view any part of the business structure and we have staff putting in time sheets through Internet cafes as the system is Web-based and project managers can access a single management system from anywhere in the world."

Busbridge said SMEC was ideally looking for mid-tier software and chose Epicor's CRM Opportunity and Bid Management module because of customization and breadth, adding it expects the package to improve contract win rates, increase revenue and improve overall cash flow.