Alan Wood & Partners
Serving the construction industry since 1968, Alan Wood and Partners are experts in civil and structural engineering, with offices throughout the UK, offering professional management and engineering design services.
“From the outset, Spectrum have been professional, reliable and helpful. The systems they have installed for us have made a huge difference to the running of the company.”
Objective
In order to continue to offer its customers practical, cost-effective and innovative solutions, Alan Wood needed exactly the same level of service from Spectrum in respect of Print Management, Finance Automation and Business Intelligence, in a paper-heavy, technical environment.
The Company
Serving the construction industry since 1968, Alan Wood and Partners are experts in civil and structural engineering, with offices throughout the UK, offering professional management and engineering design services.
Challenges
- Automation of time consuming processes
- Specific operations were slow and cumbersome
- Requirement to automate manual accounting tasks
- Necessity to speed up manual/paper-based processes
The Solution
As well as managing the copy/print/scan requirements of the customer, through the installation and ongoing maintenance and management of Canon’s photocopiers and printers, Spectrum’s audit of Alan Wood’s business needs uncovered a number of other areas of opportunity; most notably in respect of the customer’s use of paper forms. On every project, previously engineers needed to complete numerous forms manually, the information from which was then copied across into a software package and the paper copy was physically filed away. This seemingly straightforward process was actually very time-consuming and, with the introduction of electronic forms and document management software, engineers are now able to complete this process online. This not only populates the company’s ERP system, but also generates outgoing letters automatically and then securely files them away, meaning the originals can be shredded and the electronic-versions retrieved in seconds.
The second phase of the Alan Wood project was to help visualise the company’s real-time position on project costings and WIP. By integrating with the customer’s finance ERP software and a number of other sources, we were able to translate vast quantities of complex data into easy-to-understand and ready-to-use information using world-leading Business Intelligence software.
