With their head office based in Newport, East Yorkshire, Kitchen Civils Ltd undertake a wide range of civil engineering and industrial building projects nationwide both as a Subcontractor and Principal Contractor, including design and construct contracts. With a reputation for delivering projects on time, within budget, and to exacting quality standards, Kitchen Civils Ltd has a track record in delivering high quality project work.
The Challenge
On-site managers used a manual Excel-based material requisition process. Materials requests from site would need to be compiled in an Excel spreadsheet and emailed to the office, at which point the office staff would be required to manually enter the request and raise a purchase order in Sage. The process was both cumbersome and time consuming.
Both on-site and office teams were keen to move away from this inefficient method of communication and the resulting duplication of work that came with it.
Company Accountant Amy Hardcastle explained, “We were growing fast and our existing material requisition process was really beginning to slow us down as volumes continued to grow. It was inefficient and time consuming, and there was a real desire to somehow automate the entire process.”
In late 2019 Kitchen Civils Ltd as a wider project decided to move their entire job costing processes to Construct for Sage 50, and in doing this, also opted for Eque2’s Purchase Orders Mobile App.
The Solution
The adoption of Eque2’s Mobile Purchase Orders App has enabled their on-site managers to draft POs and then submit them directly to Construct, all carried out directly from within the App. This then prompts Construct to automatically raise the corresponding PO on the system, at which point the office team can then access, amend, and authorise the PO accordingly, with no duplication of tasks or information whatsoever. In addition to this process, the seamless workflow has also removed the requirement for emails as a form of communication from site to office, which has resulted in no more missed or lost requests.
Amy commented, “It means the orders from site manager never get missed or lost as it hits the system immediately, so we can get it ready for pricing and approval straight away!”.
Business Impact
The introduction of Eque2’s Mobile Purchase Orders App as an element of their Construct for Sage Job costing software has coincided with a period of significant growth for Kitchen Civils Ltd.
Being able to automate high-volume tasks such as PO request has had a significant impact on efficiency, which has played a key role in their operations and ability to grow.
Amy added, “With our purchasing process, we’ve seen a 50-60% improvement in efficiency and accuracy between our office and site managers since the introduction of the app, which has had a huge impact on our workload”.
