Industrial Specialty Services (ISS) began operations in January 2020, when a private equity group acquired a carved-out business unit in the energy services industry to provide technical maintenance and repair services to the refining, petrochemical, gas, power, pulp and paper, offshore and subsea markets throughout North America.
The Challenge
The private equity group faced an aggressive deadline to stand up the newly formed company, ISS, from scratch while generating $40 million in annual revenue and supporting 200 employees. James Craig, ISS’s CEO, needed to form his management team, hire personnel and establish new company departments for Operations, Sales, Marketing, HR, Engineering and more.
Craig knew he wanted to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution to help manage ISS’s operations and growth. Having implemented ERP solutions in the past, Craig had only one solution in mind: Acumatica Cloud ERP. He also knew who to pull in to deploy Acumatica: NexTec Group, which had successfully implemented Acumatica alongside Craig in the past.
“The primary idea was to create a solution that was designed around the cloud,” Craig says. “It was a critical element because we wanted to get away from maintaining servers or being responsible for them. We wanted to limit as much network infrastructure as possible, so we can stay focused on what we do best, which is servicing businesses in their plants and not running an overdone IT show.”
The Solution
Craig has implemented seven ERP solutions throughout his career and liked Acumatica’s ease of use, unique pricing model, scalability, open APIs and ability to integrate with third-party applications easily.
“The ease with which Acumatica works and how it looks and feels compared [to other solutions], there’s not a whole lot of comparison. Acumatica leads the pack,” Craig says.
The ISS ERP implementation took place during the COVID-19 pandemic and shortly after Hurricane Hana hit Texas and the Gulf Coast. Even with these challenges, the implementation went surprisingly well, considering NexTec’s consulting team couldn’t meet face-to-face with the team at ISS.
To make up for the lack of in-person interaction, NexTec and ISS shifted to virtual meetings and had everything up and running in just six months. NexTec’s discovery meeting was the only one held onsite before COVID-19 hit; the rest was done remotely with the exception of go-live. Holding online meetings and training webinars helped ISS lower its overall implementation costs.
The Benefits
With Acumatica in place, ISS has been able to do the following:
- Track billable hours and field service costs in real time
- Improve liquidity by fast-tracking two months’ worth of Accounts Receivable (AR)
- Gain better insight and tracking of KPIs, such as employee utilization and employee revenue levels on a project, division or consolidated basis
- Increase visibility into jobs and conduct post-analysis and profit analysis on each project in real-time
- Keep IT spending to less than 1% of TOC (industry benchmark is 1-3%)
To read the full ISS story, click here. For more information on how NexTec Group helps companies improve visibility, eliminate costly delays and gain more control over their businesses, reach out to us. We’d love to chat.